Hey everyone, I am terribly concerned as I recorded an hour long podcast with a great local personality and upon playing it back for editing, I noticed it skips in several chunks of audio. It’s completely ruined the show. But, upon recording everything looked and sounded fine. I use a xenyx 1202fx mixer and xlr mics that I hook into my mac minis audio ports and then back everything up with an external TB hard drive. I have never had this issue happen before in over a year of using Audacity as my recording software.
I tried converting to .wav and .mp3 and opened them in itunes but the problem still remains. I have tried playing with my buffer settings, my sample rate, etc and nothing seems to work. I also saved to my hard drive and opened using my mac book pro… My questions : What happened, can it be fixed and is it something I did? Any help is greatly appreciated as I am currently in full panic mode. I know I’m going to have to tell this guy “your show is completely ruined. But thanks for your time!”
If he’s famous enough, this won’t be his first time.
Does it skip in exactly the same place each time? If you magnify the show around a damaged portion and place the cursor just ahead of a skip, does it do exactly the same thing each time you press spacebar stop and start?
If it’s erratic, then the show may not actually be damaged. If exactly the same words are missing each time, they you may have gotten a bad recording.
You should fill in the holes. How old is the Mini? Which OS? Are you recording to your Mini internal drive? How is the external drive connected and do you record to it? Apple Firewire drives do this external recording thing just fine, but USB drives do not.
Are you filling up your drives? Whenever the people on the video forums tell us “It’s been working fine for years and it suddenly started doing this,” running out of fast, high quality hard drive space is a prime suspect.
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If I have a “Stop Breathing” kind of job, I double record the show. Since you have a MBP and a Mini, you could split the outputs of the mixer and feed both. I had one job where the performer brought his own recorder and we both recorded the show.
Koz