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Audacity & Audigy SE: Scratchy Recording Sound

Hi, I just bought an Audigy SE sound card. It sounds fine for regular playback, but, for recording through Audacity, all I hear is this scratchy/distorted sound like it's turned all the way up. I tried lowering the volumes in alsamixer, but, that didn't work. Wanted to know if anyone had a solution before I send it back. Thanks.

See transport. Might be set to (I forget) but uncheck any of the transports to start

What microphone / input?

Audacity has a slider for the mic input level. You could give it a try and see if that slider does anything for you. At a minimum the wave pattern while it's recording might hint at just how hot or not the content being recorded is. If you're running line input into a mic port, note that mic ports expect a less hot signal. Try using the line in port. Many powered microphones (battery / preamp) output line level. i.e. Not the pink one for those types. Probably not green either since that's normally an output plug.

$ amixer
(lists what your channels and levels are, including which device is set as the recording device.)

$ alsamixer
(to change levels and select some, but not all input devices)

You might also give arecord, rec (sox), ardour, and other apps a try at it.

Ugh, the manual is a chm file. Who the hell uses CHM these days(compiled HTML)? Apparently creative I guess.

# apt-get install kchmviewer

Can't even read that Win '98 relic of days long forgotten.
"Child entry indented as 2 with no root entry!"

So much for looking at a picture of the hardware to see what you're dealing with.

# apt-get install xchm

Success! According to the picture BLUE. Closest to the screw that locks the PCI card in place. Or whatever your case has for that. It looks like a combo jack, so you probably need to select TYPE of input in some fashion. So alsamixer and hit tab to look at the capture settings. Probably some channel there with text that you can change IEC / SPDIF / Line / Mic / whatever. I don't have that hardware so I don't know what you're looking at. alsa-project.org might have additional information.

Jefro - I'm unsure of what you mean by transport. Thanks, though.

Shadow_7 - I had it all connected right. Exactly what happens is that I do the sound test, sound comes out fine (actually, really good). I turn up the line input and the sound coming in sounds fine. However, when I open up Audacity and hit either the record button or the level meter to see how loud the sound is, the sound gets degraded all of a sudden. When I hit record, it records for about half a second then stops. If I hit play, I don't hear anything I recorded, but, the sound quality goes back to normal. I tried turning the mic down, but that didn't work. I also used alsamixer to make the sound come through the line input. I'll try arecord and let you know what's up. Thanks.

SOLVED: Audacity & Audigy SE: Scratchy Recording Sound

Thanks for the help. I ended up using arecord and after some hair pulling I got it to work. I think it even sounds better than what I got from Audacity.

For anyone's reference, what I did was to make an .asoundrc file that
contained this:

Code:

pcm.snd_blst {

        type hw 

        card 0  

        device 0

        rate 48000

        channels 2

}

Then I ran the following arecord command:

Code:

arecord -v -f dat -t wav -D snd_blst -M -d 10 | oggenc -o record.ogg -

Notice that I piped it to oggenc. You'll save significant disk space there. Take care.

FWIW, I get stuff like that in audacity if have those playthrough, and play other tracks while recording settings enabled. It varies from version of audacity to version of audacity. It also varies depending on your card. If you recompile manually with the --with-portaudio=v19 (or was it 17), it generally makes it behave nicer. Not to imply well behaved. And/or if you change some of the recording parameters(bits / rate / channels / buffer size / period size / ???). You would think that such an old card would have best guesses figured out and defaulted to by now. I used to use ardour for any serious recording, but it seems to have changed licenses or something, so I really haven't bothered to compile it from source even though I downloaded it. And my distro stopped packaging ardour as well.

Help contents in audacity would have helped for transport. Transport is on one of the pull down menus.