New user version and 'skipping' questions...

[DJ Si De Burns]

Hi,
I jst started using Audacity with my cdj 400s and djm 400 mixer, on a dell inspiron laptop 1545 running Vista. All seems good, to begin at least. Firstly, I'm not sure what version of Audacity i've got. I got it April 2012 so i guess it's 2.0? Then, when i start a new project, after about 6 minutes or so, the tracks i'm recording kind of jump and skip (even though there are clean). I'm wondering if the factory installed sound card needs to be improved upon? If anyone can confirm this or knows another possible cause for the distortion during recording, I'd be mighty pleased to hear from them! Thanks y'all.

[kozikowski]

Either Audacity > About Audacity or Help > About Audacity.

You're generally safe if you're in the "2" versions. Latest 2.02 is recommended.

Stuttering, cracking, popping, and other run problems can be caused by your USB connection going through a hub instead of straight on. USB Home Runs only.

How full is your hard drive? Live audio (and video) takes a huge amount of memory and it surprises everybody. You're the poster child for filling up a drive. "I've been doing this for days and suddenly I have damaged sound..."

http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/fa ... html#skips

Koz

[DJ Si De Burns]

Thanks Koz,

Appreciate your reply. When I said i've been doing it for a long time, i meant djing in the real world. I only just got audacity up and running today and the skipping, increased distortion thing, happened after literally my first project.

[steve]

How much free disk space do you have?
Has the hard drive been defragmented lately (or ever)?

[kozikowski]

Real Time Recording is very stressful for a computer. Perfectly normal computers that do Photoshop and Excel Spreadsheets fall face-first in the mud the first time they're asked to do real-time recording or playback -- or in the case of Overdubbing, both at once.

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

By default, Windows Vista and 7 should defragment automatically in the background at a specified time once per week, as soon as the computer is detected idle (of course if the computer is switched on).

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/wind ... -hard-disk .


Gale