I am having a problem attempting to record from a Yamaha P-140 stage piano to Audacity 2.0.3 using a Roland Duo Capture USB audio interface. The recording comes out almost perfectly, apart from occasional tiny "pops" in the audio. Maybe 3 or 4 of these occur over a 2 minute recording. Zooming in on the offending section in Audacity shows that the wave is "broken", i.e. in both the left and right channels it jumps suddenly up or down and is not a smooth wave like the rest of the recording.
What I know so far:
- I have a dual boot of Ubuntu 12.10 and Windows 7 and the effect is identical in both.
- I have changed the sample rate on the Duo Capture from 44.1k to 48k with no effect.
- I have changed the EXT option from * to ** on the Duo Capture with no effect (it must be on ** to be recognised at all in Ubuntu).
- My laptop should be easily powerful enough to record without dropouts, the CPU usage goes no higher than 10% while recording. It has 6 GB of RAM. Therefore, I have not yet changed any quality settings in Audacity (apart from the sample rate to match the audio interface).
- The Duo Capture is plugged into a USB 3.0 port.
- I haven't yet tried any other recording software, but I've always read Audacity is quite highly rated.
I'm fairly sure the cause of this is not the piano, but I don't know whether it could be the audio interface, the laptop or the software. Any ideas at all?
(Later today I can upload a screenshot of the broken waveform if my description isn't clear enough)
Thank you!