Trouble recording over a drum loop in Audacity

[Cerb]

A while back I threw together a killer drum loop on Invalid Link Removed. The problem is that now that I finally have something that would sound good played over it, it's giving me troubles. I throw the loop into Audacity on track 1. I begin recording the bass track with the 'play while recording' option set so that I can hear the beat. It will record fine for a while, but then the waveform begins randomly jumping. Upon playback, these areas are nothing but horrible fuzz. Also, the timing will always be late on the bass track in relation to the drums. This is the only file that I've had this problem with, though I've yet to try with another loop from the same site. What about the drum track would cause this, and is it fixable?

P.S. I just tried it on a friends copy of Cakewalk and I had the same problem.

 

[niftydog]

Sounds like for starters you need to look into latency. Searching the Audacity help file or web forum (if it exists) should set you on the right path. This is the reason for the timing being out between bass and drums, even though you played in time whilst recording the bass.

As for the glitches, I have found that recording takes quite a bit of processing power, and if the processor is distracted by higher priority operations then it's gonna fall over. I get this when ripping audio from DVDs using PowerDVD and Audition simultaneously. The solution was to reduce the load on the processor by relieving it of some graphic processing tasks by turning off the waveform display in Audition (or simply by minimising Audition giving the same result.)