Audacity Forum

I just started using the beta for Win7. I made a mix of 18 songs, exported as a WAV, and when I played it back in iTunes, I noticed that on several occasions, one of the stereo tracks drops out at random -- like in the middle of a song for 30 seconds -- and then both tracks come back, just as suddenly.

It also happened to me with the non-beta version. I figured maybe it was an incompatibility issue with Win7, so I downloaded the beta, but it does the same thing.

Could this be a sound card issue? I used Roxio's music editor for a long time and never had any audio issues, so I'm not sure what to think. My laptop came loaded with Vista, and I just upgraded to Win7 a few weeks ago. I don't have any info on the sound card at the moment, but I can check when I get home tonight.

No damage was noticed when you were mixing? Do you mix on headphones?

This is very unusual damage. I can't wait for us to figure it out. Did you Save A Project and Export a WAV? Are they both broken and in the same places?

Koz

kozikowski wrote:No damage was noticed when you were mixing? Do you mix on headphones?

This is very unusual damage. I can't wait for us to figure it out. Did you Save A Project and Export a WAV? Are they both broken and in the same places?

Koz

I did mix on headphones. I layered the tracks (I wanted them to bleed together -- but not crossfade -- at the beginning and end, like a radio broadcast), and I spot-checked each one to see if there were any problems. At first, a couple of the tracks were playing only one channel, but then I'd go back to play the same spot, and the stereo came through fine. So I kept going and crossed my fingers that everything would come out OK.

This may have been a roundabout way to do it, but I saved the entire project as a single WAV file, and then I reopened it, inserted labels where I wanted the tracks to break, and then did (I think -- sorry, I'm new to this, and I can't check right now) Export Multiple.

Sure enough, when I listened to the mix all the way through in iTunes, I heard several stereo drop-outs -- and not in the same places I was hearing them originally.

Even more odd is that the single channel that remains plays through *both* channels. For example, the opening organ solo on "Won't Get Fooled Again" comes through the right channel in a stereo presentation, but I was hearing the left channel in *both* earphones, so that all I heard was a faint echo of the organ solo, as I'd hear it in the left channel only.

There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for where the stereo drops out. And as I mentioned, one problem area may exist during one playback but then sound just fine on the next playback.

At the risk of being just too simple, are your headphones plugged in all the way? If your speakers are plugged into your sound card, are they plugged in all the way? You can get seriously strange playback issues when all the metal rings on a sound plug don't line up.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audioconnecto ... ctors.html

Pull out the plug and push it in a couple of times and then give it a quarter turn.

Koz

kozikowski wrote:At the risk of being just too simple, are your headphones plugged in all the way? If your speakers are plugged into your sound card, are they plugged in all the way? You can get seriously strange playback issues when all the metal rings on a sound plug don't line up.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audioconnecto ... ctors.html

Pull out the plug and push it in a couple of times and then give it a quarter turn.

Koz

I thought about that, actually, because that's exactly what it sounds like -- a loose headphone connection. But I stuck the mix on a flash drive this morning and took it in to work. I've been playing it on my work computer ... and I still notice the random dropouts. And now they seem to be permanently embedded in the tracks, instead of coming and going. After listening through a couple of times, it seems that the dropouts stay in the same place on the files I exported.