Audacity Forum

Hi,

I'm trying to add a voice track to a musical track. I play the track and then sing in my voice simultaneously. When I play the tracks after they are pretty synced in the start, but gets worse as the track plays.

Any idea why?

Clock drift. Best guess is that it's a hardware problem. You've probably got a motherboard sound card.

Try recording at a different sample rate (e.g. 48KHz). Does that help?

Yeah the sound card is on the motherboard.

Tried recording at 48KHz, but that didn't help. It still becomes less and less synced ...

Then it seems your hardware just isn't working right. You either need a new sound card or to return your motherboard if it's still under warranty.

The Behringer UCA202 gets recommended a lot. It's not great, but it's cheap and I haven't seen any complaints about it.

I'm experiencing a similar problem. When recording a new track while playing against a backing track(stereo) the audible timing is accurate. When playing the entire recording back, the newly added tracks are out of sync, more toward the end. What I've noticed is that the effect mainly occurs when the recording audio input levels drop to approx zero. For example, if I record something that always has a fairly high audio level, the recording stays in sync. If I record against backing tracks and wait out an instrumental solo, the recorded audio is way out of sync, during playback, when I resume playing the solo again. It's as if some zero or close to zero values are either not being saved or not sampled at all. This effect is most noticeable when recording a vocal. To get the new recording back in sync I just edit the new tracks in a zero amplitude area(where the backing tracks are doing the solos) by simply copying some of the zero amplitude samples and pasting them back in until the tracks audibly line up. This may be some problem with my computer sound card software ignoring close to zero values or some software ignoring repeated values, or ...?
Computer: Toshiba Satellite Laptop, Realtek sound card. I'll try to determine more about this problem, perhaps by trying it on a different manufacturers computer. This is fantastic software, and I've used many of the great effects, including amplitude, pitch, tempo, gverb, and Fast Fourier Transforms. My profuse thanks!