Audacity Forum

Been mucking around with the soundcard settings for a while now but nothing seems to fix it. I've tried turning levels down in the recording devices menu (access by rightclicking the speaker icon in the tray at the bottom right) and changing as many settings as I can find but with no joy yet. Any help here much appreciated.

Something I've noticed is that this problem seems quite common:
Listen to these clips.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16nkgAXUiyw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfezbkDp ... re=related


It's faint, but the distortion is definitely there.

Hmmm....

Can you make it worse?

Is there any setting that can create complete garbage intentionally? I bring that up because we're suffering from a very odd problem with some of our sound cards. The control panel lights go on and off and the sliders go up and down and none of them affect the sound card at all. Zero. Zip.

We, too, get overloading distortion, but have learned to live with it by preparing recordings quieter than normal. I'm working with another department of the company to try and resolve this. We're doing this on linux machines, but I think we both have driver issues.

Koz

Have you tried turning down the "booth" output of your mixer while watching the input level meters either in Audacity or in your system sound control panel? If you can get the Audacity meters to peak at around -6 dB you might have success. It is possible that the input to the sound card is being overloaded, and no messing with the input level sliders can fix that.

This does not address the underlying problem, but might at least allow you to continue your recording project until we can really sort things out.

-- Bill

I've tried altering the booth output so I peak at -6 dB and even lower at -24dB but I'm still getting the same distortion. I took the mixer out the loop completely and used the tape outs of my amp but still the same. I am going to try and get ahold of a better quality sound card tonight. I'll keep you posted.

sclose wrote:Something I've noticed is that this problem seems quite common:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfezbkDp ... re=related

It's faint, but the distortion is definitely there.

The youtube rip of the Robert Hood vinyl is clipped in places (red) ...
Not as bad as yours though.

Trebor - how do you get that view of the waveform that shows the clipping? Can't find it in audacity.

sclose wrote:Trebor - how do you get that view of the waveform that shows the clipping? Can't find it in audacity.

The multi-colour view is not on Audacity : I coloured a screen-grab of the Audacity display using GIMP, (using "bucket fill").

Audacity does have a "Find Clipping" option, (in the "Analyse" menu), but it won't mark points which are clipped on your example as the clipping there has occurred before the signal got to Audacity: your flattened peaks and troughs are just short of +/-1, if they had been clipped by Audacity they would be +/-1.

Thanks.

Managed to get ahold of an m audio 24/96 card today and it has fixed the issue. Plus the sound quality is far superior to the audigy so I reckon I will be buying one. I think kozikowski is right in that it is a driver issue. Creative should look into this, I will be posting them a mail about it. Thanks for all the advice. Much appreciated.