I recently purchased a samson g-track usb mic. when I use it with garage band on my imac - I get static. not always, only about 1 time in 10 recordings. I have to diconnect the mic, re-connect then it goes away for awhile. unfortunatly, I don't knot there's static until after I laid down a track - then I need to delete it and do over. any suggestions? my other analog mic works fine as well as an inexpensive usb mic i used to use
Audio Players & Recorders - Samson - G-TRACK USB RECORDING MICROPHONE Microphone
Answers & Comments
It seems like this is a problem with certain versions of OS X. You might be able to fix it by downgrading or upgrading. Apple Forums say that it's fixed in 10.5.6.
You can double check that this is the problem by trying it on a Windows computer.
It appears to be a problem with USB and the clock sample rate of the mic. You need to go into your Applications/Utilities folder to find your Audio MIDI Setup. In there you can choose the device for input and manually set the sample rate (usually 44.1K or 48K). Keep that window open while you record, and you'll find that the mic will reset itself to another sample rate on its own... don't know why, and Samson's support is pretty non-existent, so I can't get any answers from them. If you simply reset the sample rate in the Mac's Audio MIDI Setup utility the problem will clear itself up. But, with Garage Band, you'll then get a very bad latency issue that will force you to restart Garage Band to reestablish a near-zero latency. It's annoying, but it does work. (In Soundtrack Pro I can reset it without having to restart the application.)