Hi
Experienced audiobook narrator. Using PC and Blue Yeti. I’m experiencing periodic (every 30 secs or so) noise that framents the audio for about 2-3 seconds.
sample
I’ve tried lots of possibilities but wonder if you can help me?
Which Windows?
Which Audacity?
Do you have Windows set to auto update?
Do you have any other applications running at the same time—even in the background?
Have you performed a clean shutdown?
Koz
HI - and thank you.
Windows 10
Audacity 2.4.2
Windows set to auto update
Running Audacity and Voicemeeter
Apart from those, just have the pdf text file ope.
Really odd that the interference is spasmodic, maybe every minute or so. Never happened before and I’ve recorded over 150 audiobooks! No new equipment running in the home studio.
This probably isn’t the problem but I’ve heard of cell phones causing periodic-occasional interference so try turning off your phone or moving it to another room.
I think it’s dropouts which are caused when background operations or other applications interrupting and multitasking.
Your operating system is ALWAYS interrupting & multitasking even if you’re only running one application (or no applications). There are buffers to keep the audio flowing in-and-out smoothly but if something “hogs” the system for a few milliseconds too long you get buffer overflow and a glitch.
No new equipment running in the home studio.
Something may have changed with a Windows Update.
There is a FREE online book about optimizing Windows for audio called Glitch Free.
Possibly lack of spare memory, (if you have 150 audiobooks stored on the same computer).
BTW you have noise-reduction on. The audio book marketplace forbids that.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/topic/disable-audio-enhancements
Indredibly kind of you.
Many thanks…I’ll give it a read.
Paul
This is not a Help Desk. It’s a forum with users helping each other. If you do figure out what’s going on, post back.
This one’s hard. You’re an experienced user on a simple system who didn’t change anything.
There’s nothing so far that can point to internal or external interference.
How long is the USB cable and is it the one that came with the Yeti? Does the cable go straight to the computer, or side trips through a splitter or distributer?
Record a test. Start an ordinary recording and announce it but then go make coffee and record nothing until past the time that the disturbance will have occurred. Stop, and see if you can see/find the damage. Analysis may be easier without competition from your voice (which is excellent, by the way)
Shut the machine down and unplug/replug both ends of the Yeti cable a couple of times.
We’re kind of ignoring the obvious, but are you running out of drive space?
You’re doing all your active production on the local drive, right? Audacity doesn’t much like working on external, network, cloud, or internet drives.
Have you ever done a Clean Shutdown? When you shut down or restart the machine, it doesn’t actually start over. Some stuff gets left behind—some of it intentionally. To really start fresh, do a clean shutdown:
I’m ignoring the theatrically obvious. The Flight Agency in your country installed a rotating navigation beacon about a quarter-mile away…
Post back.
Koz
A question about that. The damage occurs about every 30 seconds from when you start recording? Always?!?
It never occurs sooner, say ten seconds in? That’s the first possible indicator of a machine internal problem. I know this is silly, but if you keep going, does it do it again after another 30 seconds?
Koz
This problem does ring a bell. I’ve built several PCs from parts. I had a local supplier for computer memory sticks. Just once I got a bad stick and every time my job got to a certain size the memory would fail. It didn’t crash anything, the job would have holes in it.
It did take a while to find. I’ve never had one fail.
Can you borrow your mum’s computer for a while? Audacity is free-even the older ones. I bet everything just starts working.
If you didn’t keep the Audacity Installer, you can get a fresh one here:
Koz
Stick with the Audacity version you’re used to. The latest Audacity versions (3.7.x) can have some really serious problems.
Koz