Huge distortion, but only with one type of audio source material?

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keithpurtell

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Most is good with the upgrade to an M-Audio Delta 1010LT (on Win XP SP3). But here's where some weirdness with Audacity starts: When I brought Audacity files (and folders) home from a recording I made at work (Win 7 64-bit). I had also used Audacity (2.0.1 on both PCs) to output a WAV and an MP3 of that first version while at work.

With the new audio card at home, the WAV plays fine in Windows Media Player, the MP3 plays fine in WinAmp, but If I launch playback of the source in Audacity, distortion is horrendous. There's no clipping; amplitude is well within reason. Output volume from Audacity is set at about 60% -- changing it has no effect. Also tinkered with the Default Sample Format in Audacity but no luck. Tried changing the DMA Buffer Size in the Delta; no luck.

The card doesn't demand ASIO, so that's not it. In Audacity, any/all tests using any permutation of Windows DirectSound as Audio Host is horrendous regardless, for whatever reason. MME and a few of the following combinations are reducing the distortion from horrendous to merely awful, but that's progress. The drop-down next to the speaker icon (Output Device) is set to channels 1/2, which I've confirmed are routed to my powered speakers. That leaves the mystery of where to set the drop-down next to the mic icon (Input Device)? Both Microsoft SoundMapper and the card's "Multi" option are more awful. All the other options -- like 3/4, 5/6, etc. -- are somewhat less awful. No luck messing about with preferences/devices. I'm running out of knobs to twiddle. What next?
 
Have been trying to duplicate the problem on my computer recording the bass part for "Tom Sawyer", and both WAV & MP3 play as expected (Windows Media Player for the WAV, and Winamp for the MP3), and playback was normal in Audacity when I opened it back up to test it.
Also, playback was normal when I opened the same file in v1.3beta of Audacity.

(**I do not use Audacity for anything, so am not well versed in it at all. Had the old 1.3 beta version forever, but don't care much for it, so I never bothered to update it to newer versions. But I did a fresh install of v2.0.1 for this test)

The only time I ran into a problem with distortion during playback through Audacity was when I had the audio track open and hit the Record button, at which point Audacity played the old track while recording it into a new track.

I had only intended on recording a new take using a blank track, but Audacity played the first track automatically and added a new stereo track to record to, so I let it go to see what it would do.

But accidentally re-recording it boosted the signal so that clipping occurred, even though no settings were touched by me to make it do so. (all I intended was to do a fresh recording of what I played earlier, using a new blank stereo track.)

(*the signal boost is visible in the screen capture: top stereo track is the original recording, bottom stereo track is the same track bogusly "re-recorded")

Audacity conundrum 01.webp

Is there a possibility that this is somehow happening to you?

Other than that, I am as stumped as you.
Hoping someone else has a better idea of what's going wrong here.
 
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Keith, have you tried other DAW software rather than "players"?

There is a vast amount of 30day demos to choose from: Cubase LE6, Sonar, Samplitudes, Pro x, Producer and Silver, Sony Soundforge, Reaper.........
Dave.
 
I agree with ecc83 - try another DAW. Reaper is free to download the full version. The manual is extensive.
 
I'm familiar with the record-while-playing-back procedure, but I'm not doing that.

I already have REAPER installed at home and have been learning to use it. The reason this was an Audacity project was because it was to be very simple and "travel" between two computers.

I can go back to the source on the Web and record this at home. The reason for doing that is because I have a feeling this may be something about moving the source from Win 7 to Win XP. Of course I could re-record it at home with REAPER, but I'm curious if this really is a bug caused by moving the source from one OS to another. I'll find out when I test it tonight. Thanks!
 
" The reason this was an Audacity project was because it was to be very simple and "travel" between two computers."

You can run Reaper on a "stick" you don't even have to actually install it on a strange computer nor even do you have to have admin rights to install on said computer.

Dave.
 
Could this be a differing sample rate problem? Maybe the wav files are 44.1 and the project in Audacity is set at 48 or 96?

Just throwing that out there.
 
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