Static on Playback

November 22, 2007

I am new to Audacity. I want to copy audio via a line-in, from a cassette or record-player or similar source. I can follow the instructions about the basics, and I have tried several times to make a recording. Everything appears to go fine, but when I play back what I’ve recorded, I get static that was not on the original. Every ten seconds or so, at irregular intervals, there’s a short sharp “blat”. It sounds almost like a fart - but spare me any dumb jokes, please! It’s not due to volume overload. Nor do the various filters seem to help; I can’t get rid of the sounds at all, except by compete deletion of that point. It happens even when I record simply from the radio, so it’s nothing to do with the cassette recording as such. Any ideas? Please help if you can. Thanks.

Paulshep

Are you running virus checker software? If so try turning it off while recording - but do disconnect your computer from t’interweb or your network temporarily while you do this.

Audacity writes out a lot of little .au files (the sound samples) at short intervals - some virus checkers take up too much resource and interrupt Audacity.

You could also try letting your virus checker remain on - if you can configure it to trust/ignore *.au and *.aup files.

WC