I am about this much |<– –>| from throwing my guitar at my laptop.

I’ve recording parts for a song this few days I’m in KL since internship hasn’t started and I’m still alone in Serdang. I’ve put in a solid 3 days worth of work now and I’m still not able to put the song together. ARRRGGGHHH.

Every time I record, I find the recordings to be getting faster and faster. This was when I had a drum track running to keep me in time!! In my most desperate attempt, I even took out my metronome and recorded in an old school method. Click by click. And after about 3 hours of laying down tracks, as I was adjusting the tracks to time, I realised that some how I’m playing faster and faster and faster!!

How can this be!! I am very tempted to curse right now. Arrrghhh!!! So I decided to go for a break, so I had a hot bath and went out for a meal at 4.30pm… all the while thinking to myself, “Gosh, I’m such a terrible guitarist… can’t even play in time…” But as I thought about it, it became clear that even if I went out of time, I couldn’t be going out by a beat every 3-4 bars! that’s impossible!

Checking the length of the guitar tracks to the virtually created drum track… I realised that my guitar tracks were shorter. Strange, then I played the guitar track and drum track individually while comparing to a metronome… I realised that they were both in time. Just that the guitar track had lot’s of sudden timing mistakes in it. But I don’t remember speeding up!! Naturally, I thought it was my fault again.

But just as I started recording again, I realised something… as I was playing according to the metronome, one of the wave shapes being displayed on the screen was slightly shorter! A quick google into all known Audacity problems… and EUREKA!! Audacity tends to skip cause it can’t write fast enough to the disk.. or memory.. and in Audacity’s Wiki, they ADMIT that problem! I quote:

“If this still doesn’t work, you may want to look into using a different program. Audacity is a decent all-around audio editor, but it is not the most efficient at recording. There are other audio editors out there that are much more efficient and might do better at recording without skipping. See the Links page for some ideas for other audio recording programs, and also see the Other Programs page.”
~ http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Troubleshooting_Recordings

ARRRRRRGGGGhHHHHH!!! two solid days just to find this out!!!??? WHERE’S MY GUITAR!??? SOMEBODY GONNA GET THE HURT!!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 7:00 pm and is filed under enSOUNDenments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.