If there is no 'Enhancements' tab, look in the sound device's own control panel in 'Hardware and Sound'.įor a more detailed walk-through of the above steps for Windows (or if that does not work for your version of Windows), see Windows: accessing the Windows Sound controls.

Right-click or select each device, choose 'Properties' then look in the 'Enhancements' tab.

Right-click over empty, white, space, show disabled and disconnected devices, then right-click over each device and enable it.

Right-click over the speaker icon in the System Tray at the bottom of your screen and select Sounds.

Newer Windows PCs may have a DC offset cancellation feature when recording from the built-in sound inputs. Uncheck the 'Normalize maximum amplitude.' box unless you want to run Normalize as well (see Amplify and Normalize for what Normalize does and when to use it).Ĭancel DC offset in sound devices on Windows To perform removal, choose Effect > Normalize., with the option checked ' Remove any DC offset (center on 0 vertically)'. Removing DC offset Audacity's Normalize EffectĪudacity's DC removal method performs a calculation to make the average positive and negative sample values equal.

DC offset will become worse if the recording is amplified.

DC offset can cause audible clicks where audio sections are cut and pasted together, and can cause a click on playback at the start and end of the track, even without editing.

The distortion may become audible when effects that change the frequency content are applied, or when exporting the audio to a size-compressed format like MP3.

DC offset can cause inaudible low level distortion.This problem can possibly extend to the mix as a whole, since a sound with DC offset and a sound without DC offset will have DC offset when mixed. This is because the offset reduces the headroom between the peak level of the audio and the maximum possible level without clipping. A sound that has DC offset will not be at its loudest possible volume when amplified or normalized.You should check for and remove offset in any audio you are working with before editing it, even if the audio is not your own recording but an audio file you have obtained elsewhere.

Ocenaudio user manual