Help Recording Vinyl with Audacity

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hi there,

A few weeks ago i wanted to record some of my vinyl onto my laptop so i could listen to it on my mp3 player. I have my turntable plugged into the mixer and a rca to headphone cable coming out of the master on my mixer an going straight into the headphone jack on my laptop. I instantly noticed i could not record as audacity was not even registering the sound. After searching around on the net for a way to resolve this i found a way of doing it (right clicking in the audio devices/recording and showing then enabling the stereo mix sorted it, and once i clicked start monitoring i could see the audio and record it just fine. Problem sorted!

Anyway that was then, i loaded up audacity today to record some of the new vinyl i have bought recently when i realised the same problem has occurred. Strangely enough the stereo mix and everything is still enabled so i literally have no idea what is causing this problem.

Does anyone have any more suggestions as what to try, as ive literally just spent almost a hour searching google and i am still not any closer to having sound appear when i click start monitoring. When i change from stereo mix to the headphone option it appears, but the sound quality is absolutely awful recording like that.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Jamie

2

You shouldn’t be plugging into the Headphone Jack of your laptop. You should be plugging into the Stereo Line-In (blue) if you have one or an external USB stereo sound device.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/peaveyUCA202Lenovo.jpg

Windows laptops tend not to have Stereo Line-In and you can’t use Mic-In. It’s mono and easily overloaded.

The headphone jack probably worked because your system thought it was getting a headset and adjusted itself to do conferencing. Those are mono, by the way, not stereo. I bet your stereo captures have exactly the same thing on left and right even though you send it stereo.

Koz