I screwed up the podcast of my wife

[scoutee12]

Hi,

I have recorded my wifes podcast using two usb mics (rhode ntusb and t-bone sc 420). I'm using ASIO4ALL driver to enable two usb mic recording. I told her I could produce her first show, watched lots of youtube videos and did testing and everything went fine and smooth.

Now the recording is done and the interviewee's recording is really distorted at times (see attached file or here is a snippet: https://vocaroo.com/1gilmAYhZmPD). it starts with a clicking noise and then gets really distortet/delayed. at some point the distortion stops and the interviewee sounds fine again. but the distortion comes back. it's pretty embarrasing and I feel kinda stupid.

- What would cause such a problem?

- Is there a way to fix the audio somehow?

thanks!

[SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Accepted solution]

That sounds like a buffer size issue, and there are a couple of possibilities. The signal isn't distorted in the usual sense of an overload, but rapidly and repeatedly broken up. If this comes and goes, then it indicates that possibly another process has stolen processing time in whatever you recorded on. The other alternative is that it's caused by the internal processing used to synchronise the two USB mics running into difficulties. This process uses one mic as the 'master' sync source and resamples the other mic to match it. This is what any system recording two USB mics has to do - there's no getting around it.

There is no good news, I'm afraid. This is absolutely unfixable, as there's signal missing. Also, it's going to take a lot of investigating to find out what actually causes it. Under no circumstances would we ever recommend using two USB mics to record, as this inevitably means that one has to be resampled by the OS, and that invariably alters the quality of the signal from it, as OS resampling is, er, crap.

You would be much better off using two ordinary mics and a small mixer (or an external sound device with two mic inputs) to record - this requires no resampling and the quality is generally better as a result. Alas I have no suggestions other than the obvious ones when it comes to appeasing your wife; I suspect you'll be doing all the chores for a while... 😉

[scoutee12]

Dear SteveG,

thanks a lot for that wonderfully detailed answer. I was reading that two usb-mics are bad practice but didnt read about the syncing problem until now.

I assumed that signal was permanently lost and it would be hard to fix it. So yeah, I gotta go back do the dishes, then hang up some laundry to have time to run some errands afterwards. 😄

Fortunately the bad signal is only prevalent for 30 secs or so. So far I was able to sneakily cut the bad pieces out and make it sound like nothing is missing. Still 55 mins to go, wish me luck and have a good day!