Recording cut-out - auto-sound / Sound Blaster Problem?...

[frankmcma]

When I record my show, if there is silence, my system will completely drop the audio and there is dead silence for a second. I say my system, because at first I thought it was my cheap Labtec $10 mic, but I just upgraded to a MXL pro mic and the problem is still there.

Not sure if it is the Sound Card, Sound Blaster Live

The program i record with, Propaganda

The export to MP3, from Acid Pro 5.0 (actually..i think its on the original WAV, so scratch this one)

Anyway, here is a current episode:
http://www.fmstudio.com/podcasts/mediaartist15.mp3

Now you can just barely hear it on the computer, but if you listen on an MP3 player with headphones you can hear it. it only occurs when I stop talking for a second.

Wish I knew what the problem was..or actually..were to begin to trouble shoot it!

Any suggestions would be great!

Frank

[vox_monitor]

first of all, have you tried recording with acid? that might eliminate the app possibility if nothing else.

But it sounds like you have a noise gate or something - but it would have to be before the data gets written to the harddisk, and I'm not sure how that would be unless the gate was a seperate component.... As far as I know, you can't get an app to insert an effect between the sound card and itself on an incoming signal.

I don't know much about soundcards, but I do know that you've got a shitty one. I suppose it's possible that it just isn't equipped to deal with really low decibal sound.

Now, one thing is that mp3's, if you encode with variable bit rate, might do that because that what VBR does - it finds bits of near silence and gets rid of that data, figuring it unnecessary. Try a fixed bit rate maybe? Although you did say it was on the original wave.

....

regardless, I didn't notice it.

[frankmcma]

It is very hard to notice just playing it back on a computer, but it really stands out when I listen to it on my ipod.

I "think" I know the problem now, Propaganda (www.makepropaganda.com) has an "apply noise filter" option that goes on before you save it, i think that was the cause after a few tests I just did. I will record my next show and toggle it off, hopefully that will solve it.

As for Propaganda, in case any one is interested, its a neat program, however it is really limited in doing RSS, which is one of the reasons I got it, because it writes all the code for you. The catch is you can only have one show at a time and the new one recorded uploads and replaces the last one. Very odd, and totally the opposite of the way podcasts and archives are handled. I almost got a refund, but we'll see how the program grows. Now I just record in it, and then after bring the wav into Acid Pro 5 and mix in the intros and stuff. Then I use FeedForAll to do the RSS which seems to do a very good job.


Frank