Hi
I’ve been trying to record DJ mixes using a behringer UCA202 with a pioneer djm700 using the booth output but I have to slide the input volume down to 0.04 on audacity to avoid clipping etc. the problem is that I’m not getting that good sound from the final recording and sure it’s down to the input.
Can anyone offer any advise to improve sounds or fiddle with setting or hardware to improve?
using the booth output
We do warn people about that. It’s usually better to take a split of the show or main output rather than the booth. Booth has the segues, cross fade lead-ins and beat matching whereas the show output only has the actual show. Unless you want all the cross-fade previews.
Windows, I’m led to understand has the ability to change the volume of USB devices. Macs tend not to.
So find the device in Windows Control Panels or click on the speaker icon lower-right and see if you can reset the levels there. Obviously, if the show is overloaded no matter what the Audacity settings are, then you may be overloading the UCA202. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t have volume controls other than headphones.
Real Windows people will be along.
Koz
Thanks. I have tried taking from the master out, but again I have to turn the volume all the way down on the mixer (thus no flashing fancy lights on the meter!), and the recording becomes even more difficult to contain under clipping.
The volume of the recording setting under windows appears to be linked to the audacity setting too?
Windows often assumes that any USB audio input is a USB microphone, and so boosts the recording volume massively.
Look in the Windows Sound Control Panel to set the recording levels.
Sometimes there will be a “boost” option. If there is, then that should be off.
Many users have reported that it is necessary to turn the recording level down to a really low level in the Windows Sound Control Panel, though there seems to be a lot of difference from one machine to another. (I gave up trying to understand the weird quirks of Windows a long time ago 
)
Note that when using a mixer with a line level USB device (such as the UCA 202), the meters on the mixer will usually need to be kept under 0 dB to avoid overloading the input of the USB device. 0 dB is usually the top of “the green” and before “the orange” on the meter.
To complicate the matter further, there is more than one definition of “line level” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_level#Nominal_levels
If your mixer has an switch for “+4/-10 dB” for the output level, it should be set to “-10” for use with the UCA 202.
Windows often assumes that any USB audio input is a USB microphone, and so boosts the recording volume massively.
While I don’t doubt it does that, I wonder about why.
Let me read this back to you. USB microphones almost universally deliver a slightly soft Line Level signal to the computer. It’s the absence of mixer, amplifier, volume controls, etc, in the middle which causes production troubles. I don’t think I’ve ever met one that delivers a signal needing large amounts of gain to be useful. And even if it did, our shared forum experiences have been the show would be of no use because of noise. 40dB gain would put Frying Mosquitoes at -6. Show level.
Koz
I didn’t suggest that it made sense
From frequent reports on the forum, the usual Windows behaviour on plugging in a USB device would appear to be:
This only happens on Windows Vista and later (because those versions of Windows set the number of channels for all input devices, just like Mac OS X does).
The initial choice for non-multi-channel devices has to be either mono or stereo, and Windows sets mono. This is reasonable for most microphones and for usage as a voice recorder, but not for USB tape decks and turntables.
Again, “hot” USB inputs seem to be more an issue on Vista and later than XP, but it still varies from device to device and machine to machine.
What happens could be a reaction to the fact that USB mics often don’t seem to supply any optional “gain boost” that appears in the Windows Control Panel. And it could be a reaction to the fact that there were complaints on XP about USB mics not being loud enough.
Actually I don’t think the feature is that unreasonable. You just plugged the device in. Many applications cannot choose their recording or playback device, but if plugging the device in makes it default recording or playback device, then Sound Recorder or whatever can use the device straight away.
Even Linux sees a USB turntable as a playback device for the computer.
The solution on Windows to prevent a just-plugged-in USB device becoming default is to plug in the USB device, set the default to the device you require, then remove the USB device. Next time you plug in the USB device, it won’t take over as default.
Gale