Audacity Forum

I am using Windows XP, and Audacity 1.2.6.
I have some old voice mails from my daughter when she was a wee tot, and they are precious to me. I have been saving them on my Verizon voice mail for about five years, but I am running out of room in my voice mail box. I can only get about two more messages, then it's full. So, off to Audacity, once more. I love this program.
My problem is that it will record for a short while ok, but then there will be a max headroom type effect. There is a slight echo too, at all times. I am using a 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable, it appears to have three conductors.
These are the steps I am taking:
I plug the cable into the computer, a window pops up asking what I want to do with it, I can select Microphone, or Line In, or Open SigmaTel audio control panel, or take no action. I choose Line In.
I plug in my headphones, because I thought that this would prevent any feedback, just in case.
I plug the 3.5mm cable into the phone.
I dial the voicemail.
I begin recording on Audacity, using these settings: Mono, 44100Hz, 32 bit float.
I press the appropriate menu choices, and listen to the voice mail messages, recording what I need.

The problem is that the sound will occasionally become "Max Headroom" like, not always in the same place, and not always for the same duration.
It really destroys the recording.
Here is an example:

You can see the spiky bits, that's the "skipping" effect that is happening. I tried wiggling the cable, replaying the messages, and just when I think I might get a recording without it, it will happen again.

Can someone give some advice to help eliminate this trouble?

Audacity and in fact most live production programs audio or video will not run into a full and/or badly fragmented hard drive. Empty out until there's between 10% and 20% free space on your system drive and then run error check once and defragment multiple times.

If you've never defragmented your machine, it could take a good long while for the program to straighten everything out. Drink coffee.

Then try the audio production.

Koz

Are you able to test recording from Line-in using a different sound source (for example a CD player)?

Ooh. I have a pretty full hard drive. Good call.
I will test another audio source just in case.
I do need an external drive, move a lot of pictures off the laptop. It's our only computer right now.

It could have been the hard drive, because after I deleted a lot of stuff, and defragged, it worked a lot better. Also I bought a new computer recently, and it worked well enough through it too, so I guess that was my problem. I never did try another audio source.