Audacity giving strange clicking during recording

So the last few days I've been having some trouble with my needle drops in Audacity, giving me some strange clicking sound while recording completely rendering the rip unlistenable. I'm not quite sure why it's happening, I've reset Audacity to its default state by changing the audacity.cfg file.

Now here comes the stranger part, I'm not getting this sound recording with pro tools. I recorded just now in both Pro Tools and Audacity, at the same time and got no clicking on Pro Tools. (Yes I know the simple answer is to just record on Pro Tools, but offline bounce and having hundreds of hours of ripping practice on Audacity makes me not want to change.) I think it might have to do with the "Pro Tools Aggregate I/O" thingy, but I don't know much about this stuff. Anyone have any ideas? I'd like to avoid having to buy an audio interface to use as an external sound card, but I'd hate to buy it and have audacity still be useless.

Edit: I should probably mention I'm using a mid-2011 iMac

And for some extra help:

Here's the Audacity Rip

Here's the Pro Tools Rip

 

I had similar issues/noise when trying to record needle drops a couple years ago using an ultra cheap ADC t0 USB device from Behringer. It was intermittent, drove me nuts, and would 'start' in the middle of a track/side with no warning. I finally chucked the USB thing and went straight into my 'mic' input on the iMac. I didn't realize it has a decent ADC built in. Sounds like you're using the internal iMac ADC like I am.

I think maybe actually my problem could have been settings in Audacity too ... I was fooling around with a bunch of stuff, and possibly I changed a setting too that 'fixed' the problem. I think it had to do with playing back and recording at the same time or something. I'm not really all that 'up' on everything ...

I do see I now have 'Recording: Software Playthrough: ..." checked, I may have had 'Hardware Playthrough' checked previously.
Audio to buffer: 100ms and latency correction: 0 ms ... those seem to me to be possible culprits ...?

I don't know what the defaults are, and don't really want to change what I have now - it works! Altho I haven't ripped albums or tapes for a long time.

I actually think my 'noise' was worse (I think I may have had two issues actually), and the cheap ADC really was going bad. It would put in 'step functions' intermittently where there would be two samples happening at the 'same time': the two points would be seen in Audacity at the exact same time, connected with a vertical line! it really gave some horrific noise at those points.

Your noise is at very regular intervals (about 0.24 seconds apart) and seems to consist of negative and positive going spikes ... so I don't know really what that is. The spikes themselves are fast/short duration, so give a 'burst' of high frequency noise. Seems like if ProTools doesn't show these, and everything else is the same, it MUST be something with Audacity! I don't know what resetting to default does ...

The only other thing I can think of is to look at Audio MIDI Setup app in the Utilities folder on the iMac. I have everything set to "44100.0 Hz" and "2-ch 16 bit integer", "Automatic" hardware rate converter ... some of those settings (for line in gain/volume, etc.) change I think when you move the sliders in Audacity and/or the 'volume control' on the iMac control bar at the top of the screen.

Don't know if this helps much, but if so, happy to help ... good luck!

 

Thanks for the input, I'll try futzing with the audio input. The biggest pain in the neck is it decides to do it every now and then after a certain amount of recording, so it's hard to get it to mess up reliably enough to troubleshoot.

 

I checked my preferences and software playthrough wasn't checked. I was able to make it through a whole rip of an album with no sound, so hopefully that fixed it, knock on wood. It's just a desktop so no battery to try.

 

Your buffer could be the problem? Here is a link that might help? http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/sample_workflow_for_lp_digitization.html

 

Sorry, I thought that one had the reading on the buffer but this one does http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/recording_preferences.html

 

I'll try messing with that, I saw it but wasn't sure what it did so I kinda left it alone.

Unfortunately nothing has worked so far to keep consistent and usable rips on Audacity, though luckily with how I bought Pro Tools (student full edition) I apparently get a free upgrade to the latest Pro Tools which DOES allow to export files offline and not in real time. So my workaround has been to just rip in Pro Tools 11, bounce EVERYTHING down to a lossless huge file, and just cut it up in Audacity.

Bit of a workaround, but at least I can continue my needle drops. Hopefully messing with the buffer will help and I can skip that first step, but workarounds are part of life.

 

It could be your mouse clicks/system sounds. Somewhere in Windows you can turn these sounds off, so make sure they are.

 

Before getting serious with needledropping I was using my pc's line in, yep sure enough it was recording all the background actions also

 

Lightfoot's Rainyday People had a ****-ton of modern day bleeps and blips

 

Looking at the Audacity file in Audacity, the noise is extremely regular at 0.24 second intervals and consists of negative and positive going spikes. These are not system sounds ...

and, the OP has an iMac ...

 

Oops!