Problems recording a second track (multi-tracking)

[steve]

You still have a bit of "clipping" - the audio should never touch the top/bottom of the track, but the major problem is that there are some "discontinuities" in the waveform. Rather than the waveform going smoothly up and down, there are parts where the waveform suddenly jumps to a new level. These points will be heard as clicks.

firsttrack000.png (9.99 KiB) Viewed 250 times

This may be because there is a data bottleneck somewhere in your machine that is preventing all of the audio data to be written as a continuous stream to your hard drive, in which case you will need to look at the issues discussed on this page to try and get your computer running better: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Troub ... ings#Skips

Another possibility is that it could be a bug in the sound card driver that is preventing the sound card from functioning correctly in "duplex" mode (playing and recording at the same time.
See also these pages:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Impro ... ng_quality
and
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Updat ... ce_Drivers

[Gale Andrews]

I hit record, play guitar, and hit stop. Then I plug in my bass, hit record, play and hit stop...

OK, so you unplug guitar, then plug in your bass... We can rule out anything in the amp to do with multiple instruments connected?

Can we rule out only one instrument being affected? I agree loudness is not likely to be the cause, but if you can keep the bass guitar to 0.5 on the vertical scale in Audacity, it's possible the problem might not trigger.

And the headphones output never sounds crackly if you listen to it in headphones rather than record it?

There are a few more "anti-skipping" tips here:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Manag ... nd_Drivers

which is intended as the "definitive" list. It would probably be better that "Troubleshooting Recordings" linked to that page rather than duplicating part of it.



Gale