I’ve recently built a new PC and was testing out my mic settings on Audacity and noticed that there was always white noise in the background. I’ve tried moving away from my PC, but this doesn’t change the volume and there isn’t anything else in the room making any noise. I don’t want to have to edit the noise out after every recording, so are there any suggestions of why this could be happening? I’ve checked that there’s no audio boost on and the mics volume is turned down to 50% when recording. The mic is a Samson C03U and is a USB mic.
All microphone systems have noise. It’s your job to make the performance so much louder than the noise that nobody can hear it. The sample you sent has normal noise and no performance volume.
Make the Audacity sound meters very much bigger by clicking on the right-hand edge and pull sideways. Watching them accurately is important.
http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/Audacity1_record.jpg
Then you need to get closer and closer and louder and louder and keep turning the volume up until the bouncing red sound meter reads like that illustration. That’s normal volume: peaks dancing at about -6.
You don’t actually have to make a recording for this. You can right-click on the red meters and Start Monitoring. Click again to turn it off.
Koz
Ahhh great thank you I’ll give that a try now!