Playback Gone Quiet/Recording Noise

Hello, let me start off by saying thanks for Audacity, it’s an awesome program that I’ve used for a long time now. I had the 1.3 Beta on my laptop (Vista) and just recently got a new computer (Windows 7), so in that I had to upgrade to version 2.0 when re-downloading Audacity.

Anyway, to my point. So far I’ve had two concerns. Number one is this; when I record, my speakers play a very faint static-type noise. If I mute the speakers, I don’t hear the noise, but I do voice acting and I like to play my recordings back to myself. I don’t remember this ever happening on my laptop with 1.3 (same speakers used), but at the same time my laptop was slightly louder than this tower so maybe I never heard it. Noise Removal seems to deal with the issue without any trouble, but if I can simply… “Turn OFF Pointless Recording Noise”, that would be lovely. It’s not a vital problem, suffice to say.

My second issue is lesser, and it’s only happened once. When I was playing a recording back, sound simply went really quiet. Output volume in Audacity was at maximum, as was my computer’s and speakers’, it just suddenly dropped significantly. I had been playing the same recording back a couple of times when this suddenly occurred. My solution was to copy and paste everything into a new Audacity project, but I was wondering if there’s something about this I should know, or if it’s just a simple quirky glitch.

And also, this might be just me jumping the gun, but I feel like when it actually starts recording is a split-hair of a second past when I actually press record. It might be just me getting too eager and talking too soon, my solution was to just wait a second more before I start speaking which is fine, but I figured I’d mention it to ask if there was something about this I should know, if it’s either a fault with Audacity 2.0, or a setting I can mess with that I didn’t see.

Thank you for reading, and take care!

Make sure you are recording whatever input you have connected, not stereo mix. Use headphones to listen to what you are recording.

Look at all the sound enhancements in Windows “Sound” Control Panel. Sometimes these settings can create problems but you may find that enabling noise cancellation may help. See http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/faq_recording.html#enhancements .

See this for the possible cause of audio going quiet http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/faq_playback.html#muted .

On a computer, audio neither starts recording immediately, nor or is it laid down at the exact instant you record something.


Gale

When recording through a microphone in a room, it is good practice to start by letting the recorder run for 30seconds to a minute just to get a good sample of the “room ambience”. This can then be used a source of “Noise profile” in the Noise removal effect or as a source of “silence” if you want to lengthen an actual silent part of the recording.