Can't record while playing with USB Mic

[SMA11784]

I just got a Blue Snowball USB mic for my birthday, I'm trying to record with it and it just isn't working like I expected.

1) It records everything at half speed. Every second of audio I record plays back as two seconds and an octave lower. This is easy enough to fix; either Ctrl+A and increase speed 100% or set the project rate to 22050 and then change each track back to 44100; but it's still an extra step which shouldn't be necessary.

2) This is the big one. I cannot record a second track while playing the first. If I record one track and attempt to record a second with "Play other tracks while recording new one" enabled, it gets unworkably slow and choppy. Disabling "Play other tracks" allows me to record as many tracks as I want, but that's not really a solution, now is it?

There has to be a way to make this work. I've found if I export a track to WAV or something and play it back in another program that I can record a second track while listening to the others, but that creates problems when I go to mix them back together.

Any suggestions at all are welcome. In fact, make as many suggestions as you can think of (stuff that might work, that is; suggestions involving chicken blood or dancing will be ignored).

Thanks.

EDIT: I'm running 1.3.3 in Ubuntu Gutsy.

[SMA11784]

I can't get any help at all with this and I can't think of anything else to try. I'm getting nowhere fast. Anyone? Anyone?

Bueller?

Bueller?

[steve]

You are not being ignored because people do not want to help, you are being ignored because few people on the forum know Linux very well, and even fewer have access to a Blue Snowball USB mic.

A few things that are relevant to your problem:

The standard Linux kernel is not particularly good for audio software as it gives rather low priority to audio. This means that the performance of Audacity will be considerably less than if running Windows XP. For this reason, alternative kernels have been made available which improve audio performance considerably. Installing a low-latency kernel will give a significant improvement (almost up to the level of XP). Using a real-time kernel (rt-kernel) will improve it further, and if you enable real time access then audio performance will surpass what is possible in Windows (provided that it works and is stable on your hardware and OS).

If you are just wanting to do a bit of editing, then the low-latency kernel should be sufficient, and with a Debian, Ubuntu or Suse based distro it should be easy to install and stable. If you are wanting to do a lot of audio work, you should definitely try an rt-kernel. The easiest way to do this is probably installing a distro that uses it by default (such as Ubuntu Studio).

I've read several reports about the Blue Snowball microphone in which users have USB problems. USB audio devices are always less efficient than PCI sound cards, but in the case of the Blue Snowball some users have had to get their mic exchanged under warranty. Having said that, it appears that you microphone does work correctly.

Regarding the "octave/speed" problem - make sure that Audacity is set to record 44.1 kHz / 16 bit mono (my guess is that you have it set to 32 bit in "Edit > Preferences > Quality". Setting recording to mono is in "Edit > Preferences > Audio I/O" )

Audacity will usually run better with ALSA rather than OSS.

I hope some of this helps.
If you have any questions specific to the microphone, Blue have a help forum here: http://www.bluemic.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2

[SMA11784]

Well I installed linux-rt and booted up with it (going into GRUB to make sure it really was booting up the rt kernel) and nothing has improved. Audacity and Jack behave exactly the same. Ardour appears to actually be capable of recording but it's moving very slowly, kind of like Audacity did while trying to play through.

I was indeed recording at 16-bit 44.1 KHz, but it still plays back slow. I've tried every possible combination of sample rate and format from Edit -> Preferences and nothing changes the fact that everything I record gets doubled in length. However, I can set the project rate to 22050, record a track, then change that track to 44100 and it plays back at normal speed.

I'm thinking maybe I should just bite the bullet and get an analog mic.

[steve]

Well I installed linux-rt and booted up with it .... and nothing has improved.

Rats
I got a very significant improvement on my machine immediately without doing anything more than installing the rt-kernel (although I did have to remove the proprietary video driver and than re-install it after the upgrade).
There are various settings to securely enable full rt access for the audio system and optimise the system for audio but I don't know enough about it to advise so you will need to Google for the info - The information is available on the Ubuntu forum (Ubuntu Studio uses the rt-kernel and information about it is in the same forum). Make sure that you only apply one setting at a time and make backups of any changes that you make. On my machine I could not go for full optimisation as Audacity failed to run (we are going well into beta territory), but with some optimisations applied I have a stable machine that is considerably more responsive than the stock Ubuntu (I'm using Xubuntu 7.10 with the rt-kernel on a Pentium 3 500MHz Intel processor, nVidia TNT2 video card, SBLive Value sound card - I have also successfully used a Behringer UCA202 USB audio interface, but I usually use the SBLive as an analogue input and find that it performs much better than the USB device).

I was indeed recording at 16-bit 44.1 KHz, but it still plays back slow.

Rats again
All the info I can find says that those are the correct settings.
You do have Audacity set to record in mono? ("Edit > Preferences > Audio I/O", Recording Channels = 1 (mono) )

Have you checked out the Blue forums? I know that they do not officially support Linux, and they do not always seem to be particularly helpful, but they do have some Linux users on the forum so you might be lucky.

However, I can set the project rate to 22050, record a track, then change that track to 44100 and it plays back at normal speed.

How about if you have the project rate set at 44.1 then change the track to 88.2? This is not ideal, but it could be a good workaround.

I'm thinking maybe I should just bite the bullet and get an analog mic.

Have you tried Audacity using a analogue input?

[jryoung]

Hi,
I have exactly the same issue with the Blue Icicle USB preamp converter with a Rode M3 mike. So it is probably a software issue , not a hardware issue.