I am completely at my wits’ end. I’ll be recording and everything will be going fine, then all of a sudden I’ll get this weird, metallic popping noise. Can someone please tell me what this is and how to fix it? I thought it was my powered USB hub acting up, so I plugged the mic directly into the computer and it still did the same thing. I can figure out what triggers it either–I’ll be recording just fine, not moving the mic or anything, and then it will start popping all of a sudden. I’m using a Blue Yeti and editing on a Mac if that makes a difference. Is the mic itself defective? Thank you so much to anyone who can help–I’m desperate for answers and so tired of having to rerecord audio.
What I hear in the playback are small ticks not unlike what is common in LP record playback (remember those)?
I took a close look at a sample and it doesn’t look to me like it is digital in origin. Static electricity comes to mind, was this recorded on a particularly dry day?
powered USB hub acting up
Powered hub? Did you have The Yeti Curse, high pitched whine sound behind your voice? A good quality powered hub can get rid of that whine, but the rule is you can’t use the hub for anything else.
If you’ve been at this for a while, is your internal drive filling up?
Go (top of screen) > Computer > Right-Click Macintosh HD > Get Info.
Do you have stuff running in the background? Does your network plug in behind the computer? Disconnect it temporarily. Are you connected by WiFi (Fan on the upper right). Click on the fan > Disconnect Network. I had a security service misinterpret my needs and slowly took over the system until I disconnected it.
You may discover the Mac is servicing your iCloud or iTunes “in the background” taking up too much time.
Koz
Honestly, I’m ashamed to admit I don’t know ^^; If that is the problem, how do I combat that?
Yeah, I have the Yeti Curse, but honestly the powered usb hub doesn’t help at all. I still wind up having to put a mosquito killer on it. I turned off the wifi, and I think it helped? Ever since this started I’ve been doing 10-15 minute takes so I don’t waste my time recording 45 minutes of unusable audio, and out of 17 sessions yesterday only one had the clicking/popping/whatever it is. I also quit audacity completely after I finished each take instead of just opening a new project directly. My HD has 44GB of space left, so maybe I need to clear some things out?
I found that myself and what helped the most was adding an outboard USB drive and setting audacity to use THAT drive for it’s temp files. I think it might be something with the OS drive conflicting or lagging behind what audacity needs but that is just an assumption. As well in the radio stations I work at we always have a physical separate drive for audio files away from the system drive.
Good luck.
Thanks so much for the advice! I’m kinda embarrassed to ask this, but would you mind breaking that down in a “Recording for Dummies” kind of way? I’m still learning how to do all this. Can you give me suggestions on a good outboard usb drive? And point me in the direction of a tutorial for how to make Audacity use that? Sorry to ask so many newbie questions, I promise I’m studying and trying to learn as much as I can!
Ok, first off I use a PC, not a mac so if you’re a mac user things might be different. A outboard drive like this for example;
Any good USB drive could be used, make sure it’s USB type 2 or better type 3. That specifies the speed between the PC and the drive.
When you connect it to your PC via USB it should install drivers and assign a drive letter to it, like D: .
I usually then create a folder called “audio” just to be tidy.
Start audacity and in the audacity drop down menus under edit > preferences > directories there is a place to let you select the temporary file location. You hit the choose button and walk thru the directories to the one that is the portable and select “D:\audio” for example. Now though if you disconnect that drive and restart audacity it will change this back to the default directory on the C: drive. Just be aware of that.
Since I use a desktop PC I added another physical sata hard drive internally to do the same thing.
Good luck.