Overloading

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hey guys,

I’m pretty new to recording, just trying to do some basic recording in my house. I’m trying to record my trombone using audacity, and I don’t know what the proper term is, but no matter what I do, the recording is overloading. Basically, the amplitude of the shown waveform is larger than the display. I can fix this by turning down the gain on Audacity and my interface, but to get a good quality sound that isn’t incredibly “fuzzy”, the recording volume has to be basically inaudible, and turning up the playback volume just brings back the fuzziness. Is there any way I can fix this in the settings?

I know it isn’t my interface, because it’s worked fine with other programs. I’m using an M-Audio M-track USB interface and a Shure SM-58 microphone, if that helps at all.

2

Make sure your [u]Microphone Boost[/u] is all the way down and all [u]Enhancements[/u] are disabled.

(If you can prevent Windows from messing with the sound, Audacity will simply “capture” the digital data stream from the USB bus and send it to your hard drive.)

I’m using an M-Audio M-track USB interface and a Shure SM-58 microphone, if that helps at all.

I assume the meters on your interface show that the levels are OK?

It’s probably possible to overload the ADC (analog-to-digital converter) in your interface with a trombone directly into a mic with the gain turned-up. But if you meters are not going “into the red”, you should be OK.

It’s almost impossible to overload an SM57/58, so I’m sure the signal out of the mic is OK.