Audacity Forum

I hope I've posted this in the right forum, but I use Audacity 1.3 Beta, so I think I have.


Dear Audacity Team member/experienced User;

I hope you can help me with a problem I’ve been having since I can remember with Audacity.

I’m an amateur musician and I’d like to record some of my songs/covers on audacity, but I’m repeatedly having this problem:

I’m using a normal headphone/microphone set to record my music. I put on my headphones, move the microphone to in front of my mouth, press record, and sing. When I’m done, my ‘recording’ looks like this:



So, I amplify it by as much as I can, and it ends up looking like this:


After deleting the front bit ( ) which was stopping me from amplifying further, I amplify as far as I can again, and my recording looks like this:


This is where my problems really begin, and they are twofold;
1. Firstly, the recording is below the 0.0 line, and since i don’t really know what this bit ( ) is, I don’t really know how to change that.
2. Secondly (and I think if problem 1 is solved, so will this one), there are clicks in my recording which I think could be removed by the Click Removal plugin, but that’s not working. I assume that if the recording did sit on the 0.0 line which I mentioned previously, that the Click Removal would work.

The recording does play, and sound does come out, but these two problems mean that I can’t really publish or edit the recording further, as it is displaced and littered with regular clicks.

Can you help?

Regards,
Fiona

Nice pictures, they help a lot.
It's very late, so I've got to be brief but this may give you something to go on:

1) Your recording level is way too low - are you sure that your microphone is plugged into a microphone socket and not a "line in" socket? Also check the recording levels in the Windows Mixer (loudspeaker icon near the system clock).

2) "the recording is below the 0.0 line," - that's called "DC offset" and is caused by your sound card. Ideally the wave should centre around the 0 line. The reason that it is so bad is because you are having to amplify so much, so if you can get the record levels up you will probably getaway with it. (though it would tend to indicate that your sound card is probably rather low quality).

3) Digital audio is represented by numbers between -1 and +1. The "0" line is where silence should be (slightly off with your sound card). +1 and -1 represent 0dB which is the absolute maximum before digital clipping.

4) Could you zoom in very close on one of those clicks and post a picture of it. (try and pick one that looks typical)

5) Could you give a bit more info about your set-up. What sort of microphone, which version of Windows, Laptop or Desktop, How much free hard disk space, anything else that may help build a mental picture of your setup.

6) Recording audio is quite demanding on your system, so it's always worth doing some spring cleaning. Shut down all non-essential programs (check those icons near to the clock - how many of those are essential? Disable any that are not essential). Run a full virus scan. Defragment your hard drive. Free up disk space if necessary.

Wow, thanks! I just followed step one in my usual haphazard way - i.e. open the volume control, change it to recording and move the sliders and click different boxes until it works – and that’s fixed both my problems! No more clicks, and the recording is where it should be. I wasn’t aware that on the volume control you could control recording settings as well, so thanks for that! Also, I think it helps that I’ve moved the microphone to a different socket in the computer, as you suggested. And the clicks are gone!