Audacity Forum

I'm recording speech from a text to speech program straight from line out to line in. The waveform centers a little above the flat black zero line, for both the left and right channels. When there are silent parts, the waveform goes flat, making a flat blue line for those sections. The flat blue line is consistently a little above the flat black zero line. Everything worked fine with vista, but after formatting and installing 7, the waveform for both channels always centers a little above the zero line. Screws up hard limiting and normalizing.

What you've got is DC Offset.

It means that some battery voltage is leaking into the audio in your soundcard.

You can fix it using Normalise. Tick the "Remove DC Offset" box and un-tick the "Normalise" box. Do this before you do any other editing on the show.

If it worked OK on Vista but the problem appeared with 7, then maybe updating the drivers for the sound card might help - that is if there are drivers for Windows 7 for your card.

PO'L