Tech Support

[niko]

Hey, all, this is a long shot, but I thought I'd give it a try.  I've recently pulled out my microphone for the first time in three years and my recordings are having a problem with an intermittent clicking sound every couple seconds.  I thought at first that I must be jostling cables and causing line noise or something, but digging into it more, the sound is actually coming from a split second dropout, not static or other line noise.  The place in the waveform where the click occurs doesn't have a spike - it has a gap of silence.

I can't come up with anything I'm physically doing to account for the dropouts... fiddling with the cables or the microphone doesn't trigger it directly, and there's no consistency in terms how loud/soft I'm talking when it happens.

Has anyone ever run into something like this?  My microphone's approaching ten years old, so I'm willing to hear that I need to update my equipment if I want to get back into podficcing, but I'd hate to invest in a new one and find out that it doesn't fix the issue, if there's anything else I can try.

Comments

[alessnox]

Did you use the same setup before?
A problem that sometimes happens is bad sound cards. The sound processors built into computers are crap, people used to buy plug in sound and video cards to increase performance, but that went out of style, but you can get an external sound card. That moves the connector out of your noisy computer box. These all assume you have a desktop computer. If not, check your cable and your connectors first. Switch them out with other ones, and see if the problem goes away.

[niko]

Yes, same setup as before.

Hmmmm... looking at external sound cards, one detail I didn't think to mention is that I'm using a USB microphone (Blue Snowball). I had a bit of a "Wow, old-school" jolt when I saw that the external sound cards mostly seem to have "normal" line-in jacks. :)

I also tried using a different USB port after posting, and am having problems getting the mic to work at ALL with a different set of ports on the front of the computer (vs. the usual ports that are on the top). It picks up some sound sporadically, but mostly just looks like it's not working at all. So my current theory is that it's a USB port issue... which is much scarier ground for me than just replacing some cables or a microphone, so that's a bummer. :p

Thanks for your feedback... definitely gave me a few different elements to consider in ways to approach this.

[shmaylor]

I had this exact same issue back in January. Basically something went wrong with my motherboard so my USB ports (all 4 of them) weren't able to process data fast enough and they ended up dropping bits of sound (I'm totally oversimplifiing here because I don't fully understand the technicalities).

Any other USB devices worked, and my mic worked on other people's computers, but the combo of my USBs + mic went bad. And a new mic didn't work either. It was completely a computer hardware issue. The repair shop I took it to said they couldn't fix it without replacing the motherboard.

I'd recommend giving your mic a try on another computer, but if it doesn't work, you might be out of luck :/ My motherboard would have been very expensive to replace, so I ended up buying a cheap ($100ish) desktop computer tower

[niko]

Ah, thanks, yeah, that sounds plausible. My computer is pretty old at this point, too, so I can believe that something similar is going on with mine... especially now that I've noticed the difference in performance between the two sets of ports that I mentioned in my reply to alessnox.

Not great news, but it helps narrow my choices a bit, anyway. :) I have a few more things I want to try, but if I do end up throwing some money at this, I think I may go with a Zoom H1 recorder, so I can let it record to its own storage... remove the computer from the sound-recording part of the equation altogether.

[kribban]

I have a Snowball and I too have the clicking problem. Luckily, it doesnt't appear to be heard on the MP3-file, just in editing.