Audacity Forum

Hi people,

I have a little question. I installed the beta version 1.3.6 and tried to record some tap-tuning session (i.e. I make acoustic guitars as a hobby, and in order to reach the best resonance of the body I have to control the resonance frequency of the soundbord before closing the body). The problem is:
during the recording the audacity seems to record the sound applying a high-pass filter, so the lowest frequency, up to 60Hz, seems to be attenuated. I'm using a macbook and the built-in microphone. There is no problem when I do the same recording under windows XP, under VmWare, on the same Macbook... so i think it's a programming problem and not a hardware problem. What do think about?

Thank you so much,
Enzo

I do think it's a programming problem, but not where you think.

Audacity does not apply filters during capture. Many people would like it to do that, but it doesn't--all versions.

So that leaves the two operating systems. I wouldn't be shocked to learn that OS-X tailors the response of the microphone to best suit an iChat session featuring two or more human voices. Audio response under those circumstances is a complete waste of time and can actually cause damage below about 100Hz. It's a communications microphone never intended to record the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Windows, of course, will have no such programming because it doesn't have Standard Hardware. It needs to be able to manage any one of the thousands of microphones out there. It just sees a microphone in a box and treats it flat and unprocessed. However, if you start a Microsoft Net Meeting session on this machine with a friend, I bet you have troubles with fan rumble, handling noises, auto gain pumping and room slap effects all at or below 100Hz, and all missing on the Mac side.

So since Audacity will cheerfully run on all three computer platforms, capture the performance on the Windows side and process, if you want, over on the Mac side. The standard Audacity Export Sound Format is WAV because Microsoft WAV files will open correctly on all three computers. Keep in mind that Audacity does not "Save" sound files. You have to Export to get a sound file you can back up and email to somebody--or move to another computer.

What provision is there for getting data between the two sides--Microsoft and Mac? I was never clear on how they did that.

Koz