Intermittant clicks / pops

[edhipkiss]

I've been using Audacity for a couple of years and have recently noticed a small problem - how long this problem has been present for I'm not sure!

When listening back to some recent audio that I've recorded in audacity there appear to be random clicks or pops that are not present on the original. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to these noises (i.e once every 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc) and they seem to appear on all recordings - music streamed from online, music from a USB turntable and music streamed via WMP from CD or DVD.

The only 2 "post-recording" functions I tend to use are the normalisation and noise removal options. The noises are present on recordings with no normalisation, and on recordings with no noise removal, so it must be happening during the actual streaming not in post-production.

Any ideas what may be causing this? I've tried shutting all non-essential applications such as Windows, Word etc., whilst recording, but it seems to make no difference.

Thanks for any help.
Ed.

[kozikowski]

How full is your hard drive and when was the last time you defragmented? If a musical cut has been spread out over 52,874 different places on your hard drive because of overcrowding, then yes, Audacity may have a hard time finding all the pieces in time for playback. Audacity will not record at all on a messy hard drive.

Could be something else, but that's quick and easy to check.

Koz

[steve]

Another major culprit is "Windows Update". If it is running in the background it can hog the cpu and/or hard drive making fluid playback or recording impossible. When recording it can be best to temporarily switch off Windows update.

There's a list of more tips here: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... aybackTips