Audacity Forum

Plug headphones into the cassette player. Play a tape and adjust the volume. Unplug the headphones and plug in the cable to the iMac.

Go to System Preferences > Sound > Input, select the Line Input and make sure the sound meter is bouncing. If not, find out why.

-- Bill

The input volume of USB devices connected to a Mac cannot be adjusted. Bill, thank you very much for your input. I don't know much about macOS (but I do try to do my homework before posting). Anyway - that is why I am here - to learn. :D Help me learn. You are on Catalina, ILove2Sing is on Mojave. ...

The input volume of USB devices connected to a Mac cannot be adjusted. Some do - my old Edirol UA-1EX has a gain control (nut sadly it's now discontinued). IIRC the ARTcessories USB Phono Plus (still in production) does too What I meant was that the "input volume control" in Sound Preferences is di...

The input volume of USB devices connected to a Mac cannot be adjusted.

I believe you are correct - the clipping is happening at the A/D converter inside the turntable.

You might try upgrading to Audacity 2.4.2 and see if that helps.

-- Bill

Connect the MOTU to the Macbook. Go to Apple menu > System Preferences > Sound > Input. Does the MOTU show up there as an available input? If so, you should be able to select it in Audacity's Device Toolbar . Similarly, in the Input section of Sound Preferences, does the MOTU show up as an available...

Your cable is plugged into the auxiliary input of the cassette deck. Looking at the specs of this unit it appears it does not have an auxiliary output. You could connect a cable from the headphone output to the input of the iMac.

-- Bill

Blackhole - http://existential.audio/blackhole/ - works for me on Catalina.
-- Bill

The analog to digital converter built in to the Mac Mini is probably 16-bit integer. If so there is no advantage to setting up your input (in Audio MIDI Setup) to be other than 16-bit. Either it does the conversion to 32-bit float or Audacity does the conversion to 32-bit float.
-- Bill

No. CDs have a sample rate of 44100 Hz. There's no point in working at 48000 Hz sample rate then re-sampling when exporting the CD tracks.
-- Bill

I took the same stretch of audio and went thru steps 1-5 (as recommended by various sources online) but in CASE A: before step 1 of pulling the noise profile, I had manually set the 3 settings relatively low. And in CASE B, I had manually set the settings at different, higher levels before pulling ...