Stuttering or gaps in my recording

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hi,

First let me say I’ve been using Audacity for a long time now and hats off to everyone involved - it’s a great piece of software!

Now to my problem. I just made some recordings of some online radio. Most of them recorded fine, but some of them included little gaps regularly throughout the track - less than a tenth of a second apart.

If I manually (carefully) delete these gaps it sounds right (at least on the few seconds I tried). Problem is that I can’t delete 20 minutes of gaps where there are so many gaps per second.

First - does anyone have some way I can remove these in an automated way? I tried click removal and it didn’t work.
Second - does anyone have any idea why these got included in the recording in the first place?

Here’s a screenshot of the waveform. I’ve also attached a snippet of the wav file itself.
[attachment=1]Audacity.jpg[/attachment]

I am using Windows 7 64-bit and Audacity 2.0.3 (installed using the installer).

Thanks,
Peter

Audacity.jpg

2

Effect > Truncate Silence.

If this problem is new, is this the first time you have recorded online radio? Or have you just changed the sound device or changed its drivers?

Is “Audio to buffer” at Edit > Preferences: Recording set to the default 100 ms, or lower? Try increasing it.

Also see this link http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Managing_Computer_Resources_and_Drivers .
Especially see the far bottom of the page about running a real time latency checker.


Gale

3

Thanks! Truncate Silence did the trick!

I had set the buffer higher (I think it was 100 by default and I bumped it to 500) but maybe it needed to be higher still. Yes, this was the first time I used this particular feature. I guess I’ll need to tweak some more.

Thanks again,
Peter

4

Both Truncate Silence and changing the buffer are symptoms of the machine not being able to keep up.

When you make a simple recording, the machine has to accept the sound, make it into bits and store it on the hard drive. When you record internet radio, it has to keep two different live audio streams (Record and Play) in the air at exactly the same time. If you were going to design a computer speed test, it would look a lot like this.

Koz

5

True, but I expected that - I closed everything else and wasn’t doing anything while the recording was going on, and while my system is not a top of the line 8-core system with 16GB of memory, it’s not bad either. And other recordings of the same stream worked fine. Weird. Anyhow, problem solved. Thanks!

6

If it happens again, you’ll need to run one of those latency checkers and/or look at the sound device drivers http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Managing_Computer_Resources_and_Drivers#Ensuring_proper_device_and_driver_performance .


Gale