Weird static in background, but only when speaking

Audacity 3 Help Forum macOS
1

Hi everyone, I have a podcast where we talk about historical events. I record on a Rode Podcaster microphone. I’ve never had a problem before.

This weekend, a weird clicking/static sound showed up in my voiceover. I’ve tried noise removal and click removal, but they don’t seem to work. Since the clicks only appear when I’m speaking, I can’t isolate and remove them. Is there anything I can do with EQ or other effects to remove these somehow? I have no idea why this happened.

I’ve uploaded a clip. I’m using Audacity 2.2.2 and Mac OSX 10.10.5. Any help would be much appreciated!
Mike

2

What are the Audacity blue waves and the bouncing sound meter doing during your performance? They are valuable tools to make sure your voice isn’t too loud. Loud voices will cause overload, clipping, distortion and crunchy sound—but only when you’re talking.

The left waves are more or less normal and the right waves are too loud.
Screen Shot 2018-05-23 at 11.25.46.png
You can turn on View > Show Clipping and Audacity will paint red lines over the sound that’s too loud.
Screen Shot 2018-05-23 at 11.26.04.png
You can’t recover from heavy overload like that.

Koz

3

OK, you have a different problem. I need to look that one up.

Koz

4

Thanks for the reply!

Maybe this is good news, but the input doesn’t seem to be too loud. Here’s the waveform. I haven’t done any processing to this so far, no normalizing or compression. This is exactly how the audio was recorded.

I’m nervous this is going to happen again, since it randomly started about 30 mins into the episode. Weird, right?!

5

Some Macs have trouble recording continuous speech. Scroll down to the solutions.

https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/faq_recording_troubleshooting.html#skips

Koz

6

Dueling Posts.

There is a condition where the Mac interface can’t keep up with continuous wave work or speech. There are settings you can try to solve it.

Koz

7

Do you have a SSD in your Mac, or spinning metal hard drive?

How full is it? People who do production sometimes lose track of how much stuff they have on their drive.

Do you have many APPs running at the same time as your podcast?

Koz

8

I have an SSD, and there’s usually one or two other apps running when I record, but just things like chrome and safari, nothing major. My disk is pretty full, but I have around 10GB free I think.

Do you think this is a problem with the recording, and there’s no way to fix the audio I have?

9

Do you think this is a problem with the recording, and there’s no way to fix the audio I have?

Yes.

I can’t get any of the regular correction tools to work because the noise is always slightly different as it drifts through the show. Most of the Audacity post production tools depend on the noise being stable long enough to mess with it.

I don’t recommend that anyway because it sounds like you’re talking into a wine glass.

Something is adding those tick sounds to the show. It’s not clipping where you get too loud and it’s not dropouts where you have tiny holes in the waves.


This is a recording solution to a sister posting.

https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/faq_recording_troubleshooting.html#skips

This may help.

Past that, I’m out. Mine don’t do that and I don’t have hands-on solving problems like this.

We can wait for other ideas.

Koz

10

Just a note: If you settle Chrome on a web page heavy with graphics, animations and interactive data generation, you could have it taking 100% of your processor.

Run Go > Utilities > Activity Monitor and make it show you CPU Usage.

I know this extra activity is happening when my normally placid MBA starts running its little fan. On the Mini, the mouse response starts getting slower…and slower…

Koz

11

That’s too bad, but at least I can prevent it next time. Thanks!