Poor recording issues

[wuhan_87]

Hi,

I am having trouble with a clean recording in Audacity.

I have a Lenovo laptop attached to a Solo Focusrite interface plugged into an at2020 mic. It's showing up on the waveform and I can hear the recording during playback but the signal sounds faint, even when at max or clipping. There's also a lot of interference in the way of pops and clicks, the waveform is also offset.

I have researched and done all the recommending configurations for windows 10 but yet still have the same problem.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Hannah

[DVDdoug]

It's showing up on the waveform and I can hear the recording during playback but the signal sounds faint, even when at max or clipping.

Let's check that first... Run the Amplify effect and before applying the effect, make note of the default amplification (dB). Audacity as already pre-scanned your file and This is an indication of headroom... i.e. If it defaults to +6dB, your peaks are currently at -6dB (you have 6dB of headroom).

Then, how does the volume sound after amplifying by the default setting? Even when normalized/maximized for 0dB peaks, it may not sound as loud as a commercial recording which will usually be compressed & limited. (But it shouldn't sound "faint".)

If you are recording in mono and you're not using the guitar input you'll probably get clipping at -6dB (leaving room for the 2nd channel to be mixed-in). But the clipping indicators are correct... If neither channel on the interface shows clipping your levels are "safe" and you can boost (Amplify) after recording.

There's also a lot of interference in the way of pops and clicks, the waveform is also offset.

The most common "digital problem" is dropouts (buffer overflow) caused by multitasking/interrupts. If you have the current version of Audacity, it should be showing dropouts by default. Some hints & suggestions for avoiding dropouts.