Audacity Forum

I am using Audacity on a WinXP SP3 machine to digitize LPs.

I am finding that songs have a tiny (e.g., fraction of a second) section that are cut out of the recording. There isn't a silent gap where the music should be; rather, it is as though Audacity cuts the small piece out, then "glues" the two haves of the song back together.

It is an older computer (1 Gb, 1.8 Ghz), but the only other application I have open while recording is iTunes, so I don't think it is a resource issue. Has anyone else encountered this problem, and is there something that can be done to prevent it from happening?

Thanks in advance.

Are you sure you are using 1.2? Your description sound like you have sound-activated recording turned on, but that is not available in 1.2, only in 1.3.

-- Bill

Thanks, Bill. I am using 1.2.

Does this problem happen repeatedly through the recording?
Are you using a USB turntable?

Yes, the problem occurs a number of times in each song. I am using an old school turntable connected through an old-school receiver, which is connected to the input jack on the computer.

Okay, so I just listened to a song where the "blips" as I call them are especially noticeable. The song is "King of Pain" by The Police. I noted the run time every time I heard a blip. Here is what I wrote:

1:22, 2:22, 3:22, 4:22

Hmm... I seem to see a pattern here. The blips occur at one-minute intervals.

The plot thickens.

You do have an odd collection of symptoms. Audacity should not do that without crashing or doing something else very naughty. My natural reaction is to inquire whether you are running out of hard drive space and when was the last time you defragmented your drive. No version of Audacity will run properly into a fragmented drive.

Defrag
-- Right Click Start > Explore > Right Click Local Drive C: > Properties (Used, Remaining)
-- Tools > Error Checking & Defragmentation

A drive is filling up as far as audio and video is concerned if there is only 15% left free. Most fragmentation is bad.

Whenever somebody is having odd insanity problems, we almost always clear the problem with an upgrade to Audacity.

Audacity 1.2 is very old and no longer supported,
patched, corrected, or updated. Audacity 1.2 can
be unstable on newer computers.

Download and install the latest Audacity 1.3 from here...

http://audacityteam.org/download/

You can install both audacity 1.2 and Audacity 1.3 on
the same computer, but only use one at a time.

Audacity 1.2 will not open projects made on Audacity 1.3.

If you use MP3 or some of the more modern audio
compression formats, get Lame and FFMpeg software
from the same web site. Do not use older software
or software from other web sites, even though they
may have the same names.


Koz

Thanks Koz.

Seeing as the computer I'm using is ancient (1 Gb. 1.8 Ghz P3, Win XP SP3), should I have any problems using 1.3?

I am saving all the music to a new 2 Tb external drive. Audacity resides on the C: drive, which last I checked has around 30% free space.

As I noted in my previous post, which still hasn't passed through the moderators as I type this, the "blips" occur at one minute intervals. But not always. For example, I just listened to "O My God" by The Police, and I heard blips at :30 and 3:30, but not 1:30 or 2:30. So either the blips don't happen every time as scheduled, or I simply can't hear them because the music at that points masks them well.

I read in another thread here about a problem that occurred because the track sample rate and project rate didn't match. Could that be the problem here?

What I am doing is recording an album, entering the song titles, then exporting them as WAV files. I import the WAV files into iTunes, create new versions of the songs in Apple Lossless format, then delete the original WAV files.

Thanks.

Verbal wrote:I am saving all the music to a new 2 Tb external drive. Audacity resides on the C: drive, which last I checked has around 30% free space.

Are you saying that your Audacity projects are created and stored on the external drive? If so then this could be the cause of your problem. External disks are rarely fast enough to keep up with recording. You should really have the projects on the C: drive. You can then when it comes to exporting time do the exports directly to the external drive as this process is not time critical like recording is.

I run Audacity for LP transfers on a lower spec XP PC than you, using Audacity 1.3 and it works fine.

Verbal wrote:As I noted in my previous post, which still hasn't passed through the moderators as I type this, the "blips" occur at one minute intervals. But not always. For example, I just listened to "O My God" by The Police, and I heard blips at :30 and 3:30, but not 1:30 or 2:30. So either the blips don't happen every time as scheduled, or I simply can't hear them because the music at that points masks them well.

This sounds as if you may have a background process running at regular intervals that is interrupting the recordng process - virus checker perhaps?

WC

waxcylinder wrote:Are you saying that your Audacity projects are created and stored on the external drive? If so then this could be the cause of your problem. External disks are rarely fast enough to keep up with recording. You should really have the projects on the C: drive. You can then when it comes to exporting time do the exports directly to the external drive as this process is not time critical like recording is.

Thanks, I will give this a try. The external drive is a 2Tb WD Elements model with an interface transfer rate of 480 Mbps. I have no idea if this is fast enough.

waxcylinder wrote:This sounds as if you may have a background process running at regular intervals that is interrupting the recordng process - virus checker perhaps?

Yes, it is quite possible there is a background process running. I'll check the Task Manager next time I'm on that computer.

I downloaded Audacity 1.3 last night and re-recorded the Synchronicity album. Still getting blips.