Stuttering USB audio input when recording

Question

Stuttering USB audio input when recording

Hello,

I have an 27" iMac (late 2013) (new to me as of 1month ago......refurbished by a respected mac dealer in London).

I am connecting my Zoom h2n USB microphone to it to record with Audacity but the audio stutters as I record. This makes the recording completely unusable.

I have been researching as much as I can but cannot find an answer. I have been adjusting latency settings in audacity as described by some forums with no luck.

I have also turned off update screen during playback.

I do NOT get the same issue from the internal microphone..

I DO get the same issue when using the zoom mic with a different sound recording app.

The spec of my iMac is:

27" late 2013

Quad core i7

32gb ram

3tb Fusion drive

OS: el Capitan (fully up to date 10.11.5)

Can anybody please shed any light on what might be causing this and how i can fix it? (PLEASE!)

For such a highly spec'd machine, i would not expect these issues.

I would really appreciate any help you guys/gals could give me.

Charlie.

27" imac 2013-OTHER, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5)

Posted on Jul 7, 2016 12:34 AM

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Answer 1

Rudegar

Level 10

181,278 points

Jul 7, 2016 7:19 AM in response to CharlieKentUK

usb mics and speakers are not just that they are usb audio cards and rely heavy on the usb device driver provided by the manufactor make sure you have their latests driver also having them connected in a usb hub with other devices can mean they have less cpu time which they also heavily rely on

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Answer 2

Jul 8, 2016 12:32 AM in response to Rudegar

Hi - thanks for the reply,

Yes I have the latest zoom firmware on the mic device and i am using a good quality cable to connect direct into the imac (no hub).

Is there anything I could/should do to ensure the imac sound driver is up to date?

I do not have the same problem with my wife's 2009 macbook pro running mavericks.

I have the imac setup to bootcamp with Windows7 (only on the mechanical hard drive). There is no recording problem with this, so it suggests the problem lies with either Mac OS X el Capitan or the fusion drive?

Short of clean installing mavericks on the imac (i don't have yosemite), I am not sure what the next step could be.

I really hope that the fusion drive is not causing the problem (it was meant to be a performance improvement!).

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Answer 3

Sep 14, 2016 5:24 AM in response to CharlieKentUK

I just recorded an entire podcast on an H2N last night using QuickTime and was tremendously disappointed to find this exact same problem that you described: there's regular stuttering, and then the recording gets sped up (and pitched up) to make up for lost time. Totally unusable. What a disaster.

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