Audacity Forum

You did pick one odd thing. The default sample rate of 44100 will not directly support 22000 tone. Launch Audacity and Edit > Preferences > Quality. Change the first value, sample rate, to 96000 > OK. Generate > Tone: Sine, 22000, 0.8 amplitude, and the duration you wish. After it arrives, File > Ex...

you've got a steep learning curve for a fortnight.

It's not two weeks. The end of July could be a week and a half away or less. Fuzzy values should always be assumed to be worst case -- and that's without emergency deadline mobility.
Koz

That sounds like it might be Windows trying to do noise cancellation with the idea of cleaning up a conference or Skype call. Modern computers aren't tape recorders any more, they're communications tools and sometimes you have to turn some of those enhancements off. Here's a recent one: http://forum...

It's not easy and some computers don't work at all no matter what settings you use. There are two desperation methods: Record an analog loopthrough cable at your sound card, and money-based software such as Total Recorder. Recording your own sound is not a guaranteed service like lighting up your mo...

I don't think this is enough time to bring a newbie up on editing, solve all the problems, and produce a polished, finished product. Had you said the end of August I'd be with you. We have another poster that's been through multiple days just figuring out how to delete the beginning of a song. Not a...

What does the file sound like in iTunes?
Control-Click the file on the desktop and Open With > QuickTime Player. What does that one sound like?
Koz

You have zoomed in way too far. If you look at the numbers in the time ruler, you are viewing a small fraction of a second. Zoom out (Control-3) until you can see more of the show. You should be able to see the hiss at the beginning of the tape and then different blue waves when the music starts as ...

I do admit that after you do this a couple of times, you can recognize the sound by the shape of the blue waves, so there is that. But at any time in that whole process, you can SpaceBar play the highlighted area and hear what you selected. "OK so this grassy looking stretch is the tape hiss an...

This is a step by step to do it with the mouse. See the first part of the show with bad beginning. TinyBadStart.png Drag-Select a tiny portion of the beginning, show and all from the beginning of the file. DragSelectWholeFirstPart.png Magnify Selection. Control-E. FirstPartMagnified.png Drag-Select ...

Go into the Windows Control Panels and make sure Windows is trying to play music to your speakers. It's a very common error that Windows is trying to send the music back to your cassette player.

You may also get around this by unplugging the cassette player from the computer.

Koz