iRig and Audacity.

I don’t know if you guys have dealt with this at great lengths or not, but the search function yeilded no results for any topics about, “iRig,” so I apologize if this is redundant.

I’m trying to record electric guitar to audacity via the headphone jack of a fender frontman, through an iRig, into my computer. I’ve used ALL of the inputs on my tower, mic in, line in, line out, and have gotten nothing but the occasional quiet static that has nothing to do with what the guitar is playing.

At first I thought this was an issue of not using a digital amp’s “line out,” so I tried with a Line 6 Spider IV. Again, no dice with that.

I’m running XP with a fairly old dell computer that has an updated motherboard. The motherboard has a built in sound card that appears to be a Realtek HD. It has a lot of options that aren’t native to the windows sound controller and appears to run parallel to it. I’ve always had success with adjusting my EQ settings with the Realtek interface, so I’m not sure what the issue is.

I’ve tried selecting all available sources within Audacity to see if any of the jacks on my tower work, and they do not.

I have, however, had success with playing through my iPod touch with the iRig, so I’m fairly certain it’s not a faulty unit. (Uhuhuhuh, I said “unit”)

If anyone can help me I would greatly appreciate it. The blue snowball I use to record vocals and acoustic picks up a lot of residual noise from the guitar itself when trying to record electric leads. Like the clicking of the pick against the strings and all that. I’m certain the quality would be 100% better with a direct line in, so I’m desperate here.

You can hear the guitar through the amp, right? Do you have enough adapters to get the guitar pickup directly into the sound card? If you really hog down on a musical chord on the guitar, the signal from the pickup is almost line level. It will distort seriously and overload if you try to plug it into the Mic-In.

Do you have all three inputs available on your soundcard?

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/soundCardFinal2.jpg

I expect the guitar to to work plugged into the blue Line-In. Do you use Skype or other telephone or conferencing equipment? Does the sound card work – can you hear YouTube or computer sound effects like shutting down tone or starting tone?

Koz