Loud hiss from cassette and AMPLIFYing

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hello,

New to all this and not that smart anymore due to a TBI. So please bear with me.

We had a Crusade at our church. And the kid recording the service didn’t have the output sound loud enough. So after I downloaded it into Audacity 2.01 I than amplified it
=10. Now it has a big HISS and it’s almost hard to hear the preacher. Well you can hear the preacher, but with a annoying hiss.

What to do?
Thanks,
Bill :confused:

2

Did you miss a step? He recorded it quietly to a cassette and you played the cassette into Audacity, right?

There could be two problems. Getting a cassette into a Windows machine can be a challenge and if you do it wrong, the distortion and noise go way up. How did you connect them?

Quiet cassettes are noisy. Cassettes never caught on as a very high quality recording medium because it was so easy to mess up and there was a blizzard of technologies all of which assured us they were going to cure all the ills. Are there at least two Dolby settings on your machine? One DBX? Metal Tape?

So if you got the show into Audacity, what you have may be it. Audacity is not good at reducing hiss. There are tools for it, but they change the problem, it doesn’t go away.

Koz

3

Thanks kozikowski,

Ya, I used this cheep cassette player thing to send the music to Audacity. The player is listed in newspapers for this use, but for $19.99, that’s what you get. It’s not mine, but I’m trying to use it. I have a singer that wants me to change his cassettes to CD’s. He’s the one who bought this cheep machine. So will they all end up with a hiss? There prerecorded cassettes. He sings in churches all the time and I wouldn’t want to give him garbage :cry: .

THANKS,
Bill

4

You can only safely amplify to the level Audacity offers when you open Effect > Amplify. Amplifying to the level offered avoids creating distortion.

You will still get hiss when amplifying to the level offered if the audio being recorded was hardly any louder than the background noise.



Gale

5

Thanks, Kinda what I thought, it is what it is. But thanks for replying. I’m trying to get the tape recorder record level higher for the future.
THANKS! :smiley: