Audacity Forum

I use Audacity to compile a recorded weekly two-hour music show in my home office. I record some voice spots and drag and drop some MP3's and M4A's into Audacity. I organize the tracks into the selected order and tweak each to my liking if necessary. I then export the completed show as a WAV onto my desktop. I burn that WAV to a DVD-R (1.2 GB or so) and mail it to the station for broadcast and internet streaming.

While listening to the show via internet streaming, I hear a slight but annoying "hiss" type background noise throughout the show. This noise is not present in any of the station's studio-produced content. The way I describe it to friends is when, back in the cassette tape days, we would dub songs from cassette to cassette to cassette several times, eventually there would be noticeable noise in the playback quality, which got worse at higher playback volume.

I assume that the station's equipment is making some adjustment to the playback, bringing what should be almost nonexistent noise out where it can be heard. I am working with the station manager to identify possible problems and solutions, but I am wondering if anyone can give me some recommendations on what settings I should be using for such a project and/or what to do to eliminate this problem. I currently use the default settings of Audacity.

Thanks in advance for any help or ideas!

RB

My guess is that the noise is coming from the sound card during the voice recording.
What sort of microphone/sound card are you using? (make and model numbers would be good).