unwanted phaser efect when recording ??? HELP !

Hello, please can anyone help with this…this is driving me crazy !! when recording my guitar after a short while-usually 4-10 seconds something happens to the recorded sound of the guitar, it turns into a phaser kind of effect which i dont want ,i have tried so many things to fix this but no luck. The sound coming trough the speakers is ok while recording, but i can see the wave form get smaller after about 6 seconds ,i then play back the recorded sound and sure enough where the wave form has got smaller is where this horrible phaser effect has kicked in.also in the past while recording my second guitar track it would not be the same wave form as the first track-when double tracking an open muted E for example ,the whole of the second track would just clip. I have now got the lastest 2.0.2 downloaded but still no luck. If i could just get rid of the phaser i would be happy. When i first used audacity to record guitar years ago everything sounded great ,when recording multiple tracks i could record the 4th track while listing to the other 3 tracks and everthing was balanced–these days either i woldn’t be able to hear the track im currently recoring through the speaker or the whole thing would cilp even though a havent adjusted anything…To sum up , Help, something is wrong ,terribly wrong ,and i just cant work it out,if i could just get rid of the phaser that would be at least somthing… I am using windows xp 2002 home edition intel (r) Celeron (r) CPU 2.93 Ghz 480 MB of RAM. Any thoughts would be greatly apreciated thank you. Lawrence.

This usually happens with Win7 and Vista. In those two, Windows has voice conferencing compensation sometimes called “Enhanced Services.” It tries to kill any sound that exists for over five to seven seconds assuming that it’s air conditioning noises and needs to be stamped out.

They generally didn’t do that with WinXP, but that’s what it is. It’s the computer rendition of this:
Scroll down to the last half.

http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=68135&start=10#p192405

So your task is dig around in Windows Control Panels and look for settings that have “Automatic,” “Enhanced,” “Echo,” “Environment” or other words like that and turn that service off. It’s totally possible that these settings rode in on something else you installed having to do with communications or conferencing. Audacity doesn’t do this. It’s a Windows problem.

Koz

One other point. If you’re trying to overdub or play sound-on-sound, make sure you’re recording Just Your Microphone. Check this in the Audacity Tool Bar Dropdown. If you like recording internet audio, the device for that is Stereo-Mix, WAV-Out, or What-U-Hear, not a microphone. If you try overdubbing while recording Stereo-Mix, your second track will overload immediately because it’s recording too many things.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/toolbars_overview.html

Koz

Thanks,that sounds very logical,i will keep u posted when i find the problem .

Thank you, <program files < RealteK AC97 < Microphone effect < uncheck noise suppression .

this is a quick sample

You have another problem. You see where the left side of the blue waves, the waves seem to be hovering just above the 0.0 line? That would be bad. That’s “DC Offset” and it will cause problems in editing later. You can get rid of DC offset with Effect > Normalize > Remove DC. Don’t let Normalize do anything else.

You need to do this removal before you start mixing with the clips and segments. Once you burn a damaged track into a mix, the damage is now one of the permanent performers.

Koz

oh yes , ok , thank you for your help . Audacity is a great tool ,but i have so much more to learn,i have have many more questions but i think i will go and study the manual and forum some more first. First thing go learn about DC offset,ha ha

See here: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/normalize.html