My apologies if this isn’t the best place to ask this. I welcome any assistance in finding a better forum. My question involves low-level technical details, so that’s why I decided to ask here.
I’m running Fedora 33 with the Fedora versions of Audacity, Sound Juicer, and RhythmBox. I have ripped several CDs to FLAC using Sound Juicer. I have also used Audacity to record several vinyl LPs to FLAC. When I play these various files back in RhythmBox, there is a nasty pop when transitioning to/from files that were created by Audacity. If I jump around between different FLAC files created from different CDs using Sound Juicer, there is no noise between songs. If I play all the Audacity-created songs (in order) from a given LP, it sounds fine; no loud pops between the Audacity songs. But as soon as there is a transition between a file created by Sound Juicer and a file created by Audacity (or vice versa), there is a horribly loud pop.
I did use Audacity’s “Normalize” feature to remove the DC level from my LP recordings.
My audio interface hardware is a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2. My PC has an Intel Core i7-3770, 16 GB of RAM, and a mostly-empty 1TB SATA hard drive (spinning magnetic). CPU utilization is typically very low.
It seems to me that there is something different between the files created by Audacity and the files created by Sound Juicer. My guess is that it involves DC levels or something.
I have a degree in ECE, and I write embedded software for a living. I have broad general knowledge of A/D conversion, audio sampling, FLAC, etc., but I lack detailed knowledge of how Audacity, Sound Juicer, RhythmBox, Linux sound drivers, etc. all work down in the nitty-gritty details.
Another datapoint: Before recording with Audacity, I shut down PulseAudio, since it drops samples. After I’m done recording, I exit Audacity. I restart PulseAudio and use RhythmBox to listen to all my FLAC files.
I welcome any thoughts and advice.
Thanks!!!
Walt