Audacity Forum

Lately I've been using Audacity to play a song while recording my bass guitar, plugged in via a USB adapter. Unfortunately, on my computer the guitar track gets out of sync with the song track. This wouldn't be much of a problem if it just lagged behind in one way, but it goes out of sync multiple times in the same track, so if I fix it one place it will be wrong in another. Of course I can split it apart and adjust the different parts separately, but it's a headache to figure it all out.

I'm not sure if I can explain this adequately, so I made this project where I play along with a click track. In the project I play a note every other click, and while my timing isn't always dead on, it demonstrates the problem. It starts out with both tracks being a little off, then at 30 seconds they become farther apart, and then at 1:45 they're together perfectly. This is not what happens every time; the errors seem to occur at random times whenever I try this.

Strangely, I don't get this problem when I just record the click track with my computer's internal microphone. However, I don't think it's a problem with the USB adapter because I've used it in Audacity on two other computers and it works fine. This happens with both the beta version and the 1.2 version of Audacity. I'm using Windows 7 on a cheap HP Pavilion g6 Notebook with an AMD Phenom II P650 Dual-Core processor of 2.60 GHz and 4 GB RAM. I bought it in June but I didn't notice this problem until a few weeks ago.

It would be great if someone knows how to fix this, but if not, are there any other free audio programs I could use to play music and record myself at the same time?

Where are the headphones plugged in?
Koz

kozikowski wrote:Where are the headphones plugged in?
Koz

They're in the headphone jack. Does that make a difference?

Mandaliet wrote:They're in the headphone jack. Does that make a difference?

Yes it makes a difference. You are recording using a USB audio device, and playing back using the on-board sound card. Each device will use its own "clock" to control the sample rate. If the clock signals are not identical and constant you will get timing issues as you have described. Does your USB audio device have a headphone socket? If it does, try using that for playback.

steve wrote: Yes it makes a difference. You are recording using a USB audio device, and playing back using the on-board sound card. Each device will use its own "clock" to control the sample rate. If the clock signals are not identical and constant you will get timing issues as you have described. Does your USB audio device have a headphone socket? If it does, try using that for playback.

Interesting. My USB device is just a cord with a 1/4" audio plug on one end and a USB connector on the other. I do have something that plugs into the sound card, but the quality isn't as good, but I'll try that. Thanks.