audacity vizualizes at +.4 center instead of 0

[kb9vgr]

i record live performances at my church voice and music i am running windows seven on my laptop while recording today i noticed it centers the visual wave at +.4 it shows that it is clipping at +1 which id understand if it centered at +-0 but when i play back there is no discernible clipping which makes me think this is a visual error although when i move the project to my desktop it still shows the same thing but if i export it then import it then it centers fine it centers all imports but won't center live recordings

[waxcylinder]

No its a fault with your soundcard - it's called DC offset.

You can remove it with Audacity by using the Normalize effect. In the dialog for that effect there is an option to remove the DC offset - Don't apply any normalization at this stage. Apply the DC offset as the first thing that you do after capture and before any other processing/editing.

WC

[steve]

It may be worth looking for an updated sound card driver - this may fix the problem, but on the other hand it could be a hardware fault that can only be fixed by replacing the sound card (or using an external USB sound card).