Recording severly elongated

[Enekk]

A friend and mine are attempting to record audio of a conversation we are having to two separate computer, both running audacity. Basically, this is a really simple setup, I am plugged into my computer and she is plugged in to hers and each computer is recording.

We've run into a really strange problem. Out most recent recording was around 1hour 30minutes. Her track was about 4 minutes short of that (I think this might do with the quality of her computer - occasionally words were slurred a bit), but mine is an amazing 15 minutes longer. The weird thing is that it isn't like my voice is slowed down or anything, but more like whenever there is a legitimate gap in my speech, that gap is considerably longer than it should be. It is almost as if someone did a 'find silence' on my track and then did a random 'generate silence' at each of the found points.

So, I'm not too worried about her track being short, I think I know the cause, but what on earth would cause my problem and how do I work around it?

If it is helpful, I am running the latest 64 bit version of 1.3.x on Windows 7 and she is running the latest 32 bit version of 1.3.x on Windows Vista.

[kozikowski]

You're doing a podcast where you Skype each other, but record your voice locally. Then one emails the local track to the other and marries it to that local track for a very high quality version of the podcast.

Did I get it?

Since Skype Does Not Play Well With Others, how are you capturing your local tracks? If you suspect a show of that duration is going to have significant error from the cheap timing electronics on the sound card, you're completely correct. It says it's 44100.....

When grownups do this, they use an external clock/sync service -- frequently something from the video people whose timing requirements are far tighter. Or just much more expensive sound cards.

I think the interaction with Skype is killing you. I think a cheap sound card is killing her.
Koz

[Enekk]

Well, you are mostly right. The difference is we don't use skype, but Mumble for the voice communication.

If it were an issue with Mumble + Audacity, wouldn't I expect my voice to be off? As I've said, there doesn't seem to be anything, at all, wrong with the places where I am speaking (and for a brief moment after), but the gaps show up in the areas where I am mostly silent.

I'll have to look into external clock/sync services, we are still new at all of this.

Edit: I've googled a bit and haven't really seen much about the clock/sync stuff. Could you give me a bit more information about it?