Audio of other people is too quiet

[JesseM]

I was recording a group session the other night, the audio of my mic is good the whole way through, but part of the way in I can't hear anyone else, the auido for them just quits or is too quite to hear. I can hear them for a bit at the start and then nothing.

Just looking for some help on this, thanks!

[kozikowski]

Audacity is not recommended for recording Skype, Chat or other conferencing application. Problems such as yours are very common and it's a career move trying to solve them. Google or consult the instructions for your chat software. The Pamela people make respectable software for recording Skype on Windows.

http://www.pamela.biz/en/products/

Depending on how you personally experience the conference, you might be able to set your iPhone in the middle of the table and record using Voice Memo.

A slightly more exotic method is a microphone such as the Olympus TP-7 or TP-8 and a small personal recorder. You place the microphone in your ear under your headphones, start the recorder and do everything else normally. That's how I did this clip.

TP7SoundTest2.mp3

(151.43 KiB) Downloaded 14 times

Koz

[JesseM]

Thanks for your help! We are using Discord for voice chat, I thought I could run Audacity in the background to record our conversation. It seemed to record for a bit and dropped out after a while. Is there a better program I could use to record all of our mics at once?

Audacity is not recommended for recording Skype, Chat or other conferencing application. Problems such as yours are very common and it's a career move trying to solve them. Google or consult the instructions for your chat software. The Pamela people make respectable software for recording Skype on Windows.

http://www.pamela.biz/en/products/

Depending on how you personally experience the conference, you might be able to set your iPhone in the middle of the table and record using Voice Memo.

A slightly more exotic method is a microphone such as the Olympus TP-7 or TP-8 and a small personal recorder. You place the microphone in your ear under your headphones, start the recorder and do everything else normally. That's how I did this clip.

TP7SoundTest2.mp3

Koz

[kozikowski]

Chat applications like to take over the sound services of the computer. That and Audacity does not Play Well With Others. It always assumes you want to make a simple recording.

Chat applications are always two sounds. Your local microphone and everybody on-line. So that's another Audacity problem. It likes recording only one thing at a time. And yes, that's perfectly normal for only your local microphone to work.

I'd be Googling for it.

https://steemit.com/tutorial/@krnel/tut ... on-discord

I see there's a Google hit about using Audacity to record chats. It's a rambling, unedited video, so I didn't stick with it, but it's not unusual for videos on Audacity to be lucky guesses, misleading or just flat wrong. We point to a podcast that got insanely lucky and records his whole half-hour show repeatedly with no trouble. Nobody else can do that.

I know nobody's going to do this, but since we know the local microphone seems to work OK—nearly always, you get everybody to record their local microphones and ship you their sound files. Jam it all together in Audacity. That does work. There are experienced podcasters who do that and I've done that for broadcast.

That is a little like marching cats, however.

Voicemeeter Banana is worth a shot.

Koz

[kozikowski]

If you do get something to work, do post back and tell us what you did. Remember, it's a forum, not a help desk.

Koz