Pops and Clicks

[cornopean]

I have used Audacity before with success but when I came to do a similar job yesterday there were problems.
I'm recording from an electronic keyboard (line input) and playing in 4 part vocal harmony one part at a time and an accompaniment. Track one goes in OK, but as soon as I start track 2 I get pops and clicks every second or so. If I continue the sound resembles what happens if a faulty CD is played. Eventually everything freezes for a moment.

I cleared all temporary files, reinstalled Audacity with no joy.

However, I got http://www.nch.com.au/mixpad/ and everything works fine. So I've made my WAV files in that and then imported them to Audacity to edit and tweak them.

Any ideas? I looked to see if I could find any Audacity temporary files to clear out, but no.

I'm on XP SP3 quite an old PC, but it has worked in the past. AMD Sempron 2800+1.6GHz with 992 MB RAM

If you can point me to an old post or suggest a solution that would be great.

[kozikowski]

That should be more than enough to for a good recording. I record hours every week on a 733 MHz machine. Not, however, if the drive is highly fragmented or close to being full. Do you know how to defragment your hard drive? If you click on the drive and Explore it, it will tell you how full it is.

Koz

[cornopean]

Yes I did a Degrag and I checked drivers too. I have no idea why MixPad works OK but Audacity now doesn't. I even disables my broadband, shut off everything running I could think of to free up resources. I can record in Cool Edit too so it must be something to do with adding a new track.

[steve]

From the Edit menu, go into Preferences and look in the "Quality" tab.

If it is the same as in Audacity 1.3.x you should see options for "Real time" and "High Quality" Conversion. The "Real time" settings should be set to "Fast" and "dither" set to "none".

This will have no effect at all on your finished show, but makes a very big difference to recording and playback performance.

Note also that high bit depths and high sample rates increase the amount of data that is being written and read to and from the hard drive by a large amount. Even though your computer is considerably faster than my computer, the hard drive performance will not be much better and can easily cause a data bottleneck. 48kHz sampling rate should be sufficient for even very high quality recordings and increasing beyond this figure is unlikely to give any improvement at all.