Recordings are Skipping. Any ideas?

[steve]

And an answer from another thread:
Don't use a network drive - they're too slow.

[butter]

The laptop I record to was actually provided to me by my office but it was freshly installed before it was given to me. Also, I already made sure there weren’t and aren’t unwanted processes running in the background. The first thing I did was open task mgr and watched my cpu useage when I started to notice this.

I will try the following:

-Defragging the HD
-installing Audacity 1.3.4 and turning on the hold recorded data in memory
-recording to a different laptop

I’ll post my results.

Oh, and when converting to .wav or .mp3, it doesn’t completely clear up the skips but it’s at least audible.

Once again, thanks for all the suggestions

[butter]

So last night I did the following:

-Defragged the HD
-installed Audacity 1.3.4 and turned on the hold recorded data in memory

still having the same issues but not nearly as often.

I still have not tried recording to a different laptop. that is my next step unless someone else has another suggestion.

Thanks

[steve]

Have you got USB2 enabled on your laptop?
(If you're using USB1 with the microphone, it could be that causing the bottleneck.)

[kozikowski]

Well we got really close there. I tried to open an FTP service for you to post your sound sample and discovered I couldn't do it. The web site people changed the software on me and I nave a trouble ticket posted. Did you like, tick off the gods or something?

When you play your file and it starts acting funny, can you take good notes and tell if it's damaged in the same place every time?

Koz

[butter]

Both USB ports are enabled. should I disable USB 1 and only use 2? or shoud I only record through USB2?

I double checked when the skips take place and Yes, they are always in the same place on the track

[alatham]

Steve meant to check and make sure you're using USB 2.0 ports. Not USB 1.1 ports. He wasn't talking about the number of ports, or each individual port's name. I'm not entirely sure how to check and see if you're using 2.0 ports.

[steve]

To check for USB 2.0, this may help:

http://www.usbman.com/Guides/checking_for_usb_2.htm

[butter]

I verified I am using USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller on my laptop.

[kozikowski]

Sudden Unexplained Windows Insanity could mean you're not the only person using your machine. When was the last time you updated your virus software and did a complete (hour long) system scan? "It's automatic and I don't worry about it." doesn't count. Every so often you have to stop and completely scan the machine.

I don't see a response to the question about the number of processes running. Were you able to check that?

Koz