Audacity Forum

https://youtu.be/SVLOaq1iDig
Here's a video of the problem

Upon hitting record (or sometimes play) audacity plays an insanely loud hissing noise for about half a second (sometimes longer) before settling. This only occurs when my audio interface (Avid Mbox) is plugged in. It means I can't record with headphones for fear of being jumpscared and damaging my ears. PLease help!

I am using the most recent version of audacity (to my knowlege) on windows 10 on a dell laptop

If I forget to check to this forum just notify me on the video of the problem
cheers

insanely loud hissing noise

My first, no-thought processes at all idea was noise reduction. Auto Noise Reduction works by sensing when a single sound has been there for a while and the process identifies the sound and kills it. You can listen to this happening on some cellphones.

You, however, have feedback. You have oddball sound pathways and they establish themselves out of proper order when you press an action button. After a bit, pathway management catches up and everything is fine. So for a split second, the sound goes nuthouse.

Do you like to record on-line music or sounds? Are you trying to set up, or have you succeeded in setting up recording Skype, Zoom or other chat app?

I predict (pressing fingers to forehead) you have the MBox set up to repeat Audacity Playback back down the digital pathway. Some mixers can do that. And you have Audacity set for Audacity > Edit > Preferences > Recording > [X] Playthrough.

Or some combination of these settings. It's like the MBox loafs in E-E (passthrough) and doesn't get the word to stop until a split second late. If you trace those paths, it's a complete loop.

Koz

If you have the option of changing the audio host in Audacity, try the different options.

If that does not cure the problem I'd try Audacity's free competitor OCENaudio which has the option of ASIO driver.

You can transfer the recording as a WAV file from OCENaudio to Audacity, as the latter is a more powerful audio editor.