Hello - I’m trying to record from a digital piano via an audio cable from the headphone socket on the piano to the microphone socket on the computer. After one initial try where it came out perfectly, now every time it comes out incredibly sped up and high pitched. Absolutely no idea what happened.
Piano is a Kawai KDP 90
Computer is using Ubuntu 22.04
Audacity version 2.4.2
Any help appreciated,
Thanks.
That’s unusual, especially with the built-in soundcard/soundchip…
Are you playing back on the same computer and soundcard?
How much is “incredibly”? How fast does a 1 minute recording play, or what’s the approximate pitch-shift?
If it’s about 10% fast it might be “confusion” between a 44.1kHz and 48kHz sample rate and you can try setting Audacity for 48kHz and then recording again.
You may be able to fix it with the Change Speed effect, but it shouldn’t have happened.
Different topic, but that’s not the best way to do it and I’m surprised it came-out “perfect”. A headphone or line-level signal is about 100 times stronger than a microphone signal. The line-input on a regular soundcard or an audio interface is a better match. And I think your piano is stereo, and most mic inputs are mono.
Thanks for the quick response.
I’m playing it back on the same computer.
By ‘incredibly’ I really do mean ‘ridiculously’ - I’ve just done a one minute recording test and it came out at five seconds long! The pitch is also so high I can barely differentiate between the notes and they all sound more like electrical blips. It’s definitely recording the notes, though, it’s not just distortion or noise. It’s just as though I’ve applied a really severe pitch and tempo compression to it.
When I say ‘perfect’ I mean in terms of the pitch and tempo - the recording sounded like what I played.
I’m starting to think that this isn’t a problem with Audacity but with my system in some way. I’ve just tried recording using another piece of software and exactly the same thing happened - recorded fine once, then every other time after that the recording comes out sped up and high pitched.
I’m going to ask about it on the Ubuntu forums and hopefully I’ll be able to re-post a solution here in case anyone else has experienced it.
Well, I seem to have accidentally got it working and have also noticed something that might give someone a clue as to what was happening - when it recorded the sound sped up and high pitched, the recording position line moved incredibly slowly as it was recording, so it would take about five seconds to cover the distance between the 0 seconds and 1 seconds mark on the timeline, then when it recorded correctly the line was moving at the correct speed to mark ‘real time’, that is it took one second to cover the distance between 0 seconds and 1 seconds.
It still seems to be doing that sometimes, but if I go into the recording settings, make any change and then put everything back to where it was (default settings) and click ‘save’ then it seems to record normally again.
More confused than ever but at least I can get it to work and it records perfectly when it’s working.
This topic was automatically closed after 30 days. New replies are no longer allowed.