Regular 'bleep'

[WillHawkins]

Hi to all,
I have a very annoying issue and wonder if you may have experienced it as well and if there's a fix.
I'm relatively new to Audacity and am in the process of digitising my entire vinyl and tape collection. However, whenever I play anything on the USB deck (It's a 'Stanton'....nice deck actually) every now and again the playback just randomly 'bleeps' for a fraction of a second and then it carries on. I've observed it whilst recording and the actual track being recorded is temporarily blocked while the bleep overrides it and it goes into the recording itself. There is no actual specific or regular time delay on this. It's random but happens semi-regularly throughout the track. It does it on everything it plays/records. I've tried re-setting the input levels etc but don't really know what I'm doing. I went down this recording route because the Audacity software and instructions seemed so simple. Clearly there's more to this than meets the eye. It's not the hardware - not from a performance perspective anyway. It's a 2Ghz Dual core Dell with 4 Gig of ram and 1 Tb HD. It seems to have a good sound and video card also. It runs XP and I am running Audacity 1.3 Beta. I've tried to revert to the old version but it does it on that as well. I don't run any other apps whilst I'm recording apart from some web browsing. I've checked the processor whilst this is all going on and it's running at a fraction of it's capability. Does anyone have any idea's I'm going nuts with it and have all but abandoned the project for the moment.

Many thanks!

[steve]

Audacity does not generate beeps into recordings, so we will need to try and determine where the beep is coming from.

First let's check that you really do have Audacity 1.3.12.
Open Audacity and go to the Help menu > About Audacity. It will tell you the exact version number.

I presume that you downloaded Audacity from the Audacity web-site? http://audacityteam.org/download/

If you set Audacity to record from anything else other than from the turntable, do you still get the intermittent beep?

You're saying that the beep is actually recorded into the track, and not just a beep that you hear from your computer?

Could you select a couple of seconds of the recording, including the beep, then from the File menu, select "Export Selection" and export those couple of seconds as a WAV file. You can then upload the file to the forum (see the "Upload Attachments" tab below the compose message box).

[WillHawkins]

bleep.wav

(112.04 KiB) Downloaded 74 times

Hi Steve,
Thanks for helping me out. Firstly, software version confirmed and yes, it was downloaded from

http://audacityteam.org/download/

I've not tried anything else yet but will hook up the cassette player, see what happens with that and report back. With regards to your suggestion about a clip, please see attached.

Any suggestions gratefully accepted.

Many thanks

Will

[steve]

How peculiar. That beep is certainly being generated by something. It is a 500 Hz square-wave for exactly 125 ms.

Are you using any trial or demo audio software on your computer? (for example "Virtual Audio Cable")

[The Busker]

Hiya folks - I have recently bought an Art USB Dual Pre interface for recording vocal and guitar onto Audacity and I am having exactly the same problem you describe. An intermittant beep identical to the sound file you uploaded and also not at equal intervals. It definitely records onto the track, although it looks like you can use the 'cut' tool to remove it (although I haven't looked into whether this also removes part of the recorded sound too). I am new to computer recording and using audacity in general, so any advice would be helpful. Any ideas following the investigating you have done so far?

Thanks for your help - Colin

[The Busker]

Hello again - I have just been researching other good free software downloads and had a go with Kristal. Having set up my guitar, again through the ART USB Dual Pro interface, the exact same 'beep' problem has occurred. So from this I can assume the problem is not an Audacity one. However, the fact that you are also experiencing problems with the beep also eliminates my interface as being the problem. I am a bit of a novice with all of this so am open to other suggestions...

Cheers,

Colin

[WillHawkins]

Hi Steve,
I don't run any 'demo' audio software - but I do have some NCH Audio software on the PC ( 'Wavepad and 'Mixpad')as well. Using Wavepad the exact same issue occurs. I also have a number of other types of media software: Adobe 'Elements' , Prism Video file converter, DivX Plus player,converter and movies, as well as Quicktime.

I've hooked up the cassette player and it does exactly the same thing.

Any idea's? It seems to me that it's device independent and software independent, so it has to be something to do with the other software or sound card..... what do you think?

[steve]

Open up the Windows "Task Manager" and have a look to see what applications and processes are running. By shutting down non-essential applications and processes one at a time you should be able to determine which one is the culprit. I'm guessing that you have a program installed that wants you to upgrade to the "pro" version of itself and is beeping to remind you to pay money and upgrade.

[The Busker]

Steve and Will,

Although I have not found the driver to solve the problem, in disabling the audio USB driver and recording through my laptops built in microphone as a crude experiment, the beep sound is not happening. So it seems it is to do with having the correct driver for your audio device. Is this of any help? Please keep me posted with your ideas? Do either of you know where I can download appropriate audio USB drivers from? I have tried one or two sites with no success so far.

Cheers,

Colin

[steve]

USB audio devices do not normally need any special drivers. They are usually "plug and play" (one of the rare things that really is). Some USB audio devices have additional drivers to provide enhanced functionality or ASIO support, but basic audio support (which is all you really need) should be provided by the standard Windows USB drivers.