Audacity Forum

"do you think the problem will be found on Windows 7 as well? "

Yes it is (I have W7/64bit) and it is not so much a "problem" as a fact of life! You would have the same problem if you ran two sources thru' a hardware mixer to a tape recorder!

One solution is to buy(or find in a skip!) an old P4 pc and network it to the main one for internet recording. Also, Google for "XP music optimizations" and at least kill Windows bleeps and bloops.

Lastly, if anyone is interested in doing "serious" recording of decent quality, a better soundcard is vital and I do NOT mean a SoundBlaster! One that has stood the test of time is the M-Audio* Delta 2496 but others from ESI and Emu will be good too. For laptops (if you must for music!) the M-A Fast track pro is hard to beat on price and reliabilty.

Dave *I have no commercial connection with that company and in fact work for a local guitar amp mfctrr.

YoSFj wrote: ...loads of people who are interested in recording live radio broadcasts.

If you are doing actual real-time recording off-air as the radio station is broadcasting then you may be better off using an FM tuner (with a good aerial) connected to your PC.

This is how I capture live FM performances. I have my wife's old Technics ST-X902SL tuner (the only surviving piece of kit left from her old stack system). This is connected to me external USB soundcard (Edirol UA-1EX) and thence to my PC via the USB socket. You don't necessarily need an external soundcard - provide your PC has a line-in and not just a mic-in (most laptops just have mic inputs) - I just prefer using an external card. The Timer Record facility in 1.3.x Audacity helps me capture broadcasts when I am out or asleep.

I do sometimes also record streaming Audio from the BBC (if I have missed the broadcast). Radio-3 gives better results this way than Radio-2 as I believe R3 uses less compression.

The direct FM recordings do have a very small amount of "noise" just down to the physics of of the way a stereo FM signal is broadcast - but it still gives better results than recording the compressed digital streams. (I'm going have to follow up on Steve's suggestion and see if it is possible to extract the digital stream from the BBC website direct without recording it though.)

WC

I am using windows 7 and that is exactly my problem. When doing live broadcast recording through PC it picks up unnecessary sound, some sort of static I'm not sure. It ends up, I can't even listen back to the recorded file due to poor quality. Is there any way to cancel the noise picked up during recording?

<<<that is exactly my problem.>>>

Which is exactly your problem? The thread talks about both recording off-air and recording the on-line stream.

I finally threw in the towel on recording off-air. The next door neighbor has a noisy motor in his house somewhere (old refrigerator?) and it can be counted on to kick in with a low buzz in the middle of a show. He's between me and Mount Wilson where all the towers are. In addition, all the good shows are on a Pasadena radio station with transmitters on Mt. Wilson. Because of the elevation and location, (6000 feet) the actual transmitter power is something like 300 watts. Wilson is 30 miles away. Not a flamethrower that.

They took a while to settle down, but the current transmittion bitrate and process has little or no artifacting. I can't get it to tell me what it is, but it is suggested that it's one of the Flash variations.

Koz

This is a good news.
I was able to solve the problem.

For relatively novice individuals the procedure I took was as flows:
1. Go to the official device drivers downloading site for my notebook PC.
In my care I download three audio device drivers (and in case newest chipset driver was added for this).

Beware of NOT to download the audio device drivers directly from the sound card site since you may reproduce the same problem I had.

2. I uninstalled all the sound device softwares .
Control Panel -> Device Manager -> Sound, Video, Game Controller (Naming may be different.)
Choose the AUDIO -> Driver -> Uninstall
3. Then I installed all newly downloaded device drivers.

Some notes
I downloaded three new audio device drivers plus chipset driver.
When I installed the audio device driver last time, I downloaded only one audio device driver directly from the RealTek site.
This was simply because I found only one relevant audio device driver available to my machine.
Please also pay attention to the fact that with my laptop just clicking the second button (P)
to renewal the audio driver in Audio in Device Manager did not work.

Thank you all the people for the help.
I hope this may help people who have been struggling the same problem.