Audacity Forum

Hello, I hope you can help and sorry if my question is dumb or been asked before.

I'm trying to study a langauge for some improtant upcoming exams. I installed Audacity so I could record a friend speaking and listen to their vocie on my PC. So I need nothing fancy, just a simple voice recording.

I installed Audacity fine on my laptop. When I recorded through the built in mic, the sound quality was very poor (lots of background noise) but it was very smooth.

When I plug in a USB mic (I also tried a mic in the Mic Jack but didn't work) the recorded sound is a LOT better and clearer, but the recording skips so much I cannot use it to study with.

It's not a volume issue (which is when it clips?) but the recording just skips, meaning I miss lots of important sounds! I have a big exam next month and would appreciate any help as I have little time to mess around with my PC!

Many thanks in advance and sorry if I ask anything dumb!

It's a common problem with USB mics, but it can be one of a number of things.

Try increasing the audio buffers substantially in "Edit->Preferences->Audio I/O"
Also try a different USB socket if you have one.
Avoid having any other USB device connected at the same time.
Temporarily switch off any anti-virus programs.

If you search the forum you will probably find some more suggestions, but give those a go first.
If one of these fixes it, be sure to post how you fixed it

Many thanks for your suggestion.

It still skips a lot. Even though I closed Virus programs/shut down other software. It was better, but still skipped enough to stop any useful recording to study from.

Any other suggestions? Cheers.

JPS wrote: Any other suggestions?

Make sure that you have plenty of free disk space.
Defragment your hard drive.
Check to see if there are any non-essential processes running that can be closed.
Check that your hard drive is using DMA.
Use the task manager for checking what processes are running and if anything is hogging memory.
Don't try to use an external or network drive for audio use.
Disconnect from any networks.

Thanksm will try all that much appreciated again.

OUt of interest. For someone not techhie like me, if I paid a few dollars, is there a program I can download which would be really simple (bearing in mind I just need to record voice) if i don't get Audacity going right?

The suggestions about optimising your system primarily address the issue of getting audio data on and off your hard drive fast enough. This issue, broadly speaking, is relevant to all recording software. The fact that your first few tweaks have made a noticeable improvement indicates that you are well on the way to getting it working.

Hey Steve, thanks for your time on this. Just downloaded a program called RecordPad and it is recording without any skips. Perfect.
So not sure why Audacity wasn't. May come back to it later...but I have revision to do now!!

Cheers again.

Audacity has a lot more features than many other sound recorders, including being cross-platform and multi-track capable. It's probably because of this that Audacity is less efficient when it comes to recording than some other programs. Having said that, it's still not particularly heavy on the computer - I can record without problems on a very old 500MHz Pentium III, and have previously run it on a 200MHz Pentium II.

Another thing that may be causing the glitches in Audacity is the Quality settings. Generally speaking, the higher the sample rate and the higher the bit depth, the more demand it puts on your system. This is because higher the sample rate and higher the bit depth involves a lot more data. You can check the settings in "Edit > Preferences > Quality". For your purposes you shouldn't be going higher than 16 bit 48000 Hz. The other thing to consider with this is that your recording hardware will have a default format that it works with internally - most likely 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz. If you record at a different sample rate, a conversion will have to be done on the fly. I'd suggest that you try both 44.1 kHz 16 bit, and 48 kHz 16 bit, and see which works best.

If you decide to use different software for recording, you can of course still use Audacity for editing. You just need to record in WAV format, then import into Audacity. After editing you would Export (as WAV, or MP3). An alternative for basic recording is to use Microsoft Sound Recorder (included with Windows). Microsoft Sound Recorder has a default of only recording up to 60 seconds of audio, but there is an easy work-around for making longer recordings:
http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic ... der#p10344

Appreciated all your help onn this Steve...will probably use Audacity for editing and stuff and return to it when I get a new computer next year.

Thanks again.