The interesting thing is that if I’m recording a Skype conversation, the noise only distorts my own voice but not the voice of the person I’m talking to, so it might also be a problem with the mic, but I don’t see a way to isolate the issue.
Anyone seen anything like this before?
(Here’s the setup: Macbook Air 2015; Samson GoMic USB; OS X 10.11; Audacity 2.1.1.)
Thanks, Steve, but the problem is not with playback but with recording. When I play back the recording with the noise I mentioned, the voice from the other source (i.e. Skype) isn’t distorted.
The buffer setting affects recording too, that is why it is in the Recording section of Preferences.
And you should not record Skype with Audacity. As far as I know it can only be done by a complex set up involving Soundflower. And if you are using Soundflower, it is very sensitive to Audio to buffer being too large.
So, are you saying that Audacity and Soundflower could be a bad combination?
Audacity and Soundflower work very well. Skype and Anything Else is a known unstable combination.
Skype aggressively changes system sound configurations when it works. That’s why it works even on messed-up computers. Only software that knows about Skype stands any change of succeeding reliably.
Audacity has an additional problem that on occasion, somebody will get Audacity and Skype to work perfectly well. That would be fine except they tell their friends and all their friends crash—and arrive on the forum asking what’s going on. Worse if someone posts a YouTube video how to do it.
Audacity and Skype installs that work are rare celebrities.
I still don’t think the problem is with Soundflower, because the noise is only present on the track recorded from the USB mic, not the one from Soundflower.
Oh, and by the way, no I have a new kind of noise on some recordings, it’s like an annoying clicking but not as bad as the distortion I mentioned in the beginning. Here’s a sample: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5747921/noise-sample02.mp3. It’s also not Skype’s problem—I was recording this with Skype not launched at all (used Hangouts).
Any ideas on how to fight it, or at least to figure out where the problem is?
I never heard of anyone simply aggregating Soundflower with a mic to record Skype before. It would not surprise me that you got bursts of audio on either side. If you can record your mic on its own without sound bursts you can pretty much assume the aggregation to record Skype is the cause.
For the clicking, have you tried reducing that Audio to buffer setting in Audacity’s Recording Preferences?
If you can record your mic on its own without sound bursts you can pretty much assume the aggregation to record Skype is the cause.
No, this clicking also appears when Skype is not running at all and my mic is selected as the only sound source in Audacity. As I said, it doesn’t seem to be a problem with Soundflower. The problem doesn’t appear every time I record either, sometimes everything is just fine — with or without Skype and Soundflower.
For the clicking, have you tried reducing that Audio to buffer setting in Audacity’s Recording Preferences?
Reducing? I though I should try and gradually increase it. In any case, at the time I wrote the first post here I had this setting at 10ms, since then I increased it to 30ms, and the problem is still there. (Latency correction is at -130ms, if it matters at all — I don’t think I’ve ever touched this one.) Do you think I should try and increase the buffer?
The problem here is that the issue doesn’t appear every time I record, which makes it very difficult to reproduce and isolate it.
I was not talking about the clicking there, but about the original sound burst problem when recording Skype. I strongly suggest you try an app meant for recording Skype. You may have to pay for the app, given you are on Mac.
You have to experiment to see if it makes any difference, but probably it won’t if you already tried reducing it. Latency correction is not relevant.
Are you using OS X 10.11.3? If not, I recommend you update. 10.11.1 had lots of USB issues.
Also, try turning off WiFi when you are only recording the mic. And right-click or CTRL-click Audacity.app > Get Info, and enable the box “Prevent App Nap”.
