Help Recording Vinyl with Audacity

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

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