Missing Words in recording

[turkboys]

I am new to Audacity and have been trying to use it to record our church services. I am using a new Dell Windows Vista Laptop with a Tascam US144 USB preamp. Audio quality is great, but when I play back the audacity file, and the exported MP3 or WAV, every 30 to 60 second it sounds as if a word or two go missed. Example, the sentence should have been, "I was running past the cemetery on my way to work." And the recording got, "I was cemetery on my way to work." It is seamless, no gap, just missing a couple words.

The effect seems to be random, not occuring at a regular increment.

I have tried dropping the recording quality to 64 and to Mono rather than Stereo, but I'm not sure what else would cause this. I'm hoping someone here might have experienced this.

Any ideas?

-Steve
Sound Tech
Gateway Ministries

[kozikowski]

Can you make it worse? Is there any setting that will give you more dropped words or other distortion?

You can get problems like this if your super-vigilant Anti Virus Software is trying to inspect every single thing that's written to the hard drive. That will kill Audacity in a big hurry. Disconnect your machine from the internet and turn your Anti Virus off.

Dirty or bad USB connections will do this. Unplug your USB and plug it back in but use a different port. Restart Windows.

Record something without the USB device. Plug an analog microphone into the pink (usually) microphone connector and try to record that. If you have a Line-In connection, plug your iPod into that and see if the machine will record that music.

See if Windows Sound Recorder will capture the work without missing anything.

Windows Sound Recorder
Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Entertainment

The Windows people will be along in a bunch of hours as the earth gets around to them.

Koz

[turkboys]

Thanks for the reply. I will try shutting off AVG antivirus next time I record.

Has anyone else come across this?

-Steve

[steve]

AVG is usually quite well behaved, so long as it is not trying to update or do a scheduled system scan.

You should try to keep as few programs running as possible while you are recording. Any program that uses the hard drive intensively is likely to be trouble. At the time that you are wanting to record, before you start the recording, is there obvious hard disk activity? If so, find out what is causing it (perhaps Windows Update, Disk Defragmenter, Anti-virus scan, a virus, anything else?)

[turkboys]

Thanks Steve for the thoughts.

It's a new laptop, and I know I might have been guilty of checking my email during the recording, however I have seen others use Audacity with a far slower computer and running more programs without glitches.

It really sounds like someone is pushing the pause button for 1/2 a second. It's weird.

[kozikowski]

What happened when you tried the analog or built-in microphone instead of the USB just for a test?

Koz