Audacity Forum

Hi

I have a background hum that only occurs on my video recordings using
Camtasia. There is no hum in a recording using Garage Band or when using Skype.

To eliminate this I am in the process of using Audacity (Beta) to eliminate
the hum. I copied the sound file on one video to start the process. It was
saved to my computer. Then I loaded it into Audacity successfully. When I
clicked on play it played successfully and I could hear the recording. I then
cut the silence from the end of the sound file. Then the next time I played
the file the following error came up:

I have tried reuploading the file to Audacity and the same error message
keeps coming up. I have looked at the options in preferences for "Sound"
and have no idea how to fix this problem.

Error while opening sound device. Please check the output device settings
and the project sample rate.

Can you help with this please?

I'm going to artfully side-step the immediate issue to tell you it's rarely a good idea to run Audacity 1.2 on a Mac.

Get Audacity 1.3 from here...

http://audacityteam.org/download/

...and install it. You can put both versions on your machine, but only use one at a time. Audacity 1.3 Projects will not open in 1.2. If you use the fancy-pants extensions and plugins like lame and FFMpeg, get them from the same web site. Do Not use older software

There. That's out of the way. When you launch Audacity 1.3 the first time, go into preferences and set 44100, 16-bit, Stereo. Restart Audacity. That may solve the problem right there. If it doesn't, there could be an interesting search for the culprit. You have a festival of software on your machine and all of it likes to re-direct or reassign pathways and devices. Skype is notorious for messing with sound settings. Camtasia has to commandeer the sound pathways while it's working and sometimes, it leaves things in no-man's-land.

So it's difficult to tell where Audacity is looking when it complains about the device. Hopefully, we won't have to go looking.

Koz