Wave recording flaws

[Jon Light (deceased)]

I'm ripping some songs off of CDs and cassettes to send to bandmates as demos. I'm getting some popping, clicking and micro-second skipping. Time is lost in these skips--just fractions of beats but it sounds crappy. What sorts of things might be causing this? I'm doing other stuff on the computer while recording and my DSL modem is full-time on. I've got 1 gig of RAM.

[erik]

Jon, this almost looks like a troll. (j/k) It's almost if you're admitting you are causing the problem by over-taxing your processor. Have you tried repeating the task with your browser closed, and not "doing stuff"?

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-johnson


<font size="1" color="#8e236b"><p align="center">[This message was edited by erik on 11 November 2005 at 02:31 PM.]</p></FONT>

[Jon Light (deceased)]

Let's just say that I'm seeking confirmation that I'm overtaxing the system. If that seems the likely culprit--if these symptoms are consistent with the problems described--then I know more now than I did before.

[Earnest Bovine]

Coincidence? I just tried my first digital audio recording (besides Band In A Box) a couple hours ago. I got skips every few seconds too, using Audacity.
The skips went away, and everything worked OK when I changed to a different physical hard disk for data storage.
I previously also tried disconnecting DSL, and changing the physical disk of the Temp directory, but those don't seem to matter. In other words, I can use C:\WINDOWS\TEMP, and stay connected to the Internet via DSL, without interfering with audio recording.
This is on 866MHz Pentium 3, Windows ME.

[Jack Stoner]

As noted, you need to close all other operations. You don't have to go off line, but you need to have the Internet browser, e-mail program and any Instant Messenger programs closed while "recording" from an external audio device. Ripping songs from CD's is a straight "digital to digital" extraction and you should not get the same problems as you do with recording from the analog source (e.g. the Line In).

What program are you using for the CD "ripping" and what are you using for the audio recording (recording to the hard drive)?

Audio is a "low priority" application within Windows and other applications or hardware can cause interruptions.

[Jon Light (deceased)]

Actually it is the cassette stuff--the line in--that I was doing today and having problems with. Using Goldwave. On a P4 1.8GHz Dell.
I will certainly take this advice.
EB--I'm confused by your post---you CAN use the standard TEMP directory but for saving/storing your work you can't put into an onboard folder? Or did I totally miss your point?

[Earnest Bovine]

This Audacity program uses 2 folders.
One for "temp" defaulted to a folder it created in C:\WINDOWS\TEMP.
The other folder, where all the data ends up, defaulted to a folder it created in My Documents, which is on the same physical drive as C.

I found that it works fine if I use the default temp folder in in C:\WINDOWS\TEMP.

But I had to use a different physical disk for saving the project.

It seems counter-intuitive, since you would expect all the action to be in that TEMP folder while it's recording. But that's the experimental result.

[Jack Stoner]

Where a file gets stored, whether a folder or a physical hard drive should not be an issue. The Operating System doesn't care where it's at, as long as it has a place to store it. Same way with playback, the media player will access the data through the Operating system's disk access feature and all it knows is, it asks for data and the operating system provides it to the application.

[Jon Light (deceased)]

My money's on the anti-virus program right now. Getting good results with it shut down. But I also rebooted and started with a fresh system so there's multiple variables..

[Jack Stoner]

Generally, I don't find the antivirus programs cause as many problems as there are attributed to them. My money is on the reboot.