Hey all, I’ve spent most of my career as a developer. However since quite a while I’ve been running into the strangest unexplainable issue. It’s not only related to Audacity but to my mic in general.
Hopefully someone experienced with audio / usb mic’s can chip in.
Anyway, the problem:
If I open the “share my screen” window on discord (while my Samson Meteor USB mic is plugged in) my mouse starts freezing and strange shit starts happening.
Whenever I talk my voice get’s distorted and people hear me as something they describe as a “chipmunk” sound.
What I did next was actually record my voice using discord and now the REALLY weird thing happened. The recording speed was actually going at around 1/8th of the normal speed. When I played back the audio fragment I heard my voice as a chipmunk.
I then tried to slow it down and it suddenly sounded normal again.
I can barely see that video as I don’t have a big enough screen. However, from what I can see it looks like a sample rate mis-match problem.
Could it be 1/4 speed, or 1/5.437 speed?
If so, then the problem would appear to be that you are recording a 11025 Hz or 8000 Hz sample rate stream at 44100 samples per second.
Discord may switch to a low sample rate if the Internet connection speed is slow.
What “should” happen is that the audio device drivers should handle any necessary sample rate conversion, but that appears to not be happening.
And it doesn’t actually fix it. It just postpones the damage until next time. I think that step is the teller. Multiple different services are fighting to use the microphone. They’re running at different sampling rates and one wins. When you unplug the microphone, the connection resets and they all have to start over.
I don’t know of a good way to fix it. Lots of bookkeeping. Who is running at what sampling rate?
Do you have more than one service? Zoom and Skype? They all can leave services behind even when they’re shut down. Do you get different results after you clean shutdown Windows? Shift+Shutdown, then Start, and don’t let anything else start.
Doesn’t have to fix it. If that changes the symptoms, it’s super important to know.
The only thing that I can reliably say is that whenever I open that “share screen” thing in discord the issue instantly starts happening. I have had it happen on like a few occasions but with discord share screen it’s 100%.
but there may not be super fast fiber all the way between you, the discord server, and whoever else is in the session.
I don’t know all of the technicalities of discord, but it may throttle back the bandwidth use so that everyone in the session can keep up. However it works, it only needs one bit or ratty telephone wire somewhere in the network and the whole thing could slow down.
and you have a very large screen, so that’s going to consume a lot of bandwidth, leaving not much left for audio.
On the other hand, if you’re on a super fast network, I bet it looks and sounds stunning.
You can see the rate that Audacity is recording at - it’s the “Project Rate” (bottom left corner of the main Audacity window).
I don’t know of any way to find out what Windows is doing internally regarding sample rates.