Recordings are Skipping. Any ideas?

[butter]

Last nights test results:

So even after making all those changes to my laptop, I still experienced the skipping.

I tried recording on my other laptop after making the same changes on it and experienced the same.

here is a screen shot of my CPU performance while recording:

[alatham]

That looks quite a bit nicer now, but you're still having trouble. Damn.

Those spikes you're still seeing are Audacity accessing your hard drive to swap files in and out in order to play them (or record them). So those will never go away.

Question, do these skips appear at regular intervals, or do they appear randomly?

Also, I don't mean to brag, but my computer uses 0 -1% of it's CPU with no recording, and it jumps all the way to 3-4% when I record 8 channels in + 2 channels out. My poor computer is over-taxed, I think. When playing a large project with 20 tracks, it floats at 4% and peaks at 12% every 8 seconds or so (while Audacity swaps out files).

It's a P4 @ 3.2GHz, 1GB RAM.

[butter]

The skips appear randomly.

the laptop I'm using has a Pentium M 1.4 GHz with 512 MB or RAM.

that should be plenty. No?

So I don't know what to try next. It can't be hardware or laptop since i get the same results with my other laptop to.

[steve]

This is bugging me (but I guess not as much as you butter).

Hope this is not covering old ground, but have you tried recording from an analogue source? (for example a cheapo computer mic?)

I've done a search on Google, and you are not alone with this problem. Certainly USB mics have much greater latency than conventional analogue mics, but also it seems that some people run into power problems (not enough juice from the USB port).

This is a quote from the Snowball forum:

It seems like the USB connectivity on this box is very _marginal_, perhaps with an electrical problem which makes it work well in some connection situations and not others. Is anyone in a similar boat?

Also on their forum are several similar cases where Blue (the manufacturer) ended up advising the return and replacement of the product.

Another review here: http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Microphones- ... B000EOPQ7E states:

I inevitably got "glitches." The "glitched" audio would range from one word with bursts of noise in it to a three-minute segment completely decimated and unusable, sounding like it was a radio picking up tremendous static noise along with the signal. This meant after recording a 30-minute podcast, I would have to go back and do retakes on a dozen different sections. That suddenly turns a 30-minute recording project into a three-hour editing session.........

I applied the firmware update available for the microphone -- it didn't help.............

Then in a follow up, the same user posted:

Shortly after writing the review I decided the "glitching" problem that occurred on two different computers, different versions of MacOS X, using different audio recording problems, and different destination drives just _had_ to be the microphone's fault. So I requested an RMA number from BLUE, giving them my long tale of woe. They accepted the return and turned it around quite quickly. In fact, although they said they could not reproduce the problem, they must have believed that I had tried everything reasonable to prove that the problem was in the mic, and sent me a new unit.

I'm happy to report that the new unit does not seem to exhibit the glitching problem at all.

If Audacity records from an analogue input without any glitching, I'd suggest contacting Blue and see if you can get a replacement - it could just be that the USB is a bit iffy on yours (If recording from an analogue source works ok, then I think we've ruled out just about everything else).

[butter]

thanks for the post stevethefiddle.

I think you are right on. looking back over all the trouble shooting i've done, I'm thinking the issue is with the mic. It's the only thing that has not been ruled out so...

Can anyone suggest a decent cheap mic to record with that i can go pick up? Before contacting Blue, I'd like to try this one final test. Plus, I just need to know for myself.

Otherwise, I'm about to move to a Digital I/O (once is arrives in the mail), ProTools, and Ableton Live to do my recording now so no need to carry on any further trouble shooting suggestions.

I will try recording with a different mic then determine if I should contact Blue and see what they can do for me if that's what it turns out to be.

as always, I'll post my results for this one last test.

now if someone would suggest a mic for me...

[Rumbleseed]

I am having the same problem when I did the install,it also affected my windows sound recorder .
To me it almost sounds like a buffering problem that I've experienced in other recording progams, only thing is in the preference section I can't locate a way to change the buffering settings.I think this would be somthing to try if I could locate it.Does this program have a buffering setting?
Thanks.

[steve]

Not sure if you're looking for conventional mic or USB?

There's a couple of topics that may help:
http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=2101
http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=1909