Audacity Forum

I have a similar situation going on.
I imported a wave file ( my piano track)
I then recorded my vocals with the piano track playing through and everything was good (except a few messed up lyrics).

Then out out the blue I tried doing the vocals a 2nd time and I noticed that if I just press the play button to play the piano track it is in the key that it was originally recorded but when I press the record button the piano track plays back 1 or 2 steps higher. So if I record, singing along with that piano play-through track and then try to just play them back together, the piano track once again goes back to it's original key and my vocals are 1 or 2 steps higher and oddly enough very much out of synch.

This has never happened to me before tonight and I have been using audacity for about 2 years.

I have tried the switch from 44,000 to 48,000 and visa versa and it made no diffrence.

I trashed that whole project and started from scratch and Audacity seems stuck in the messed mode now.

It is not a latency issue due to my Presonus Audiobox has some decent ASIO drivers and I don't experience any latency in any of my other apps and like I said have never had this problem with Audacity before tonight.

Unless you built Audacity from the source code and built in support for ASIO, then Audacity will not use your lovely ASIO drivers, it will just use standard Windows drivers (ASIO can not be distributed with Audacity because of Steinberg's licensing restrictions).

kangayou wrote:I trashed that whole project and started from scratch and Audacity seems stuck in the messed mode now.

With Audacity 1.3.x it is quite simple to return Audacity to "day one" (fresh as the day you installed it).
Search for the file "audacity.cfg" and delete it. (note that it is usually a hidden file, so you will need to enable "hidden files" as a search option).

For everyone reading this,

* use up-to-date sound drivers meant for your specific device/hardware and operating system. Sound devices will not work well in full duplex mode (playing while recording) with badly written, outdated or generic drivers.
* Try to use the same device for playback and recording - different devices may have different clock speeds and may not work well together.
* setting Audacity's project rate to a sample rate explicitly supported by the device is recommended. Look at Help > Audio Device Info in Audacity to see the rates the device claims to support.
* I doubt system resource issues are a primary cause of speed problems - the main problems they cause are dropouts and clicks.
* there have been occasional reports of clicks during recording for the last couple of Betas (literally two or three reports) that we felt could conceivably be due to sample writing errors in Audacity. In all cases the problems disappeared when the users tried the latest development version of Audacity we had at the time, so no conclusions can be drawn

For those on Vista, there may be a problem with that operating system's new concept of a "Default Format" for a sound device (channels, bit rate and sample rate, for both playback and recording). There "may" be problems if this default is set to a sample rate different from the Audacity project rate, so try setting them the same. In this report, a mismatch between default format and Audacity project rate caused aliasing distortions, but I would not rule out other problems too. To view the "default format", go to the Vista Control Panel, select the playback and recording device in turn, right-click over them > Properties and look in the "Advanced" tab.

I'd recommend everyone (Vista and earlier) trying the new 1.3.7 Beta. On the Audio I/O tab of Preferences, choose the new "Windows Direct Sound" option for the playback and recording device you want, rather than MME. DirectSound is a more efficient API than MME, and has somewhat lower latency. On Vista, it has another advantage that it allows Audacity to take over the device in "exclusive mode". This means that any resampling that can't be avoided (for example, because you must use different playback and recording devices at different default formats) will be done by Audacity, not the system. This cured the issue in the report linked to above.

One other thing you could try, though it would be a bit worrying if it helped, would be to use another application to play the backing track(s) while you record in Audacity. We definitely had one person on Vista who said this helped bad playback quality in Audacity, but not speed problems.

I'm also moving the whole topic to the 1.3.x Windows Forum.


Gale