When I am recording off Youtube there is a definite reverb/echo, stop the recording and it immediately ceases, sounding normal. Start recording again and the reverb is back. Any thoughts on what I’m doing wrong? Thanks!
What are you recording? I know YouTube, but how are you getting there? Stereo Mix? What does it say in the Device Toolbar for recording?
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/device_toolbar.html
Also, you can get oddball sound if you fail to turn off Windows Enhanced Services.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/faq_recording_troubleshooting.html#enhancements
This is a thing we wrote about how to self-record.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/faq_recording_how_to_s.html#streaming
Koz
Koz - Thanks for the reply. Up to now I’ve only used Audacity with a Numark turntable to convert LPs to digital files with outstanding results. The only thing I changed in order to record off of Youtube (Lyle Lovett’s version of “Friend of the Devil”) was the input from USB Audio CODEC to Stereo Mix.
Blair
Stereo-Mix is Everything On The Computer. So if you have your speakers and microphone running all at once, that may be where the echo is coming from.
Did you go through that tutorial on Streaming Audio? It’s not always as simple as you think.
Koz
OK, check this out. Went back into Preferences, clicked on Recording and under Playthrough the second box (software playthrough) is checked. In parentheses it says uncheck when recording stereo mix and voila! no more echo on the Youtube recording. Any idea why this worked? Anyway thanks again, it helped having someone push me a little harder to look a little deeper.
Blair
Software playthrough is off (not selected) by default.
Software playthrough routes the incoming audio through to the audio output. There are not many cases where this is desirable, but one example of when it is, is when recording from a USB cassette player if there is no other way of hearing what you are recording - in that case, the cassette can be heard via the computer sound system as the input from the USB is routed through to the sound card playback.
One example of when you definitely don’t want software playthrough is when recording the sound that is playing on your computer. In this case, you record the sound and software playthrough routes that sound back out through the sound card, but you are recording sound that is playing through the sound card, so it gets recorded again, and then routed out to the sound card again, and round and round - bad idea,