New to Audacity and recording

Hello, I just downloaded Audacity and it is just what I was looking for. This is my first time trying to record something and maybe someone could help me with a little problem. I am trying to record something off an old cassette tape that myself and some friends had made many, many years ago. I am the only one with this tape and it’s very old so I want to put it onto a cd to save it. I have connected the cassette player, which I only saved just for this reason, to an little portable speaker and it sounds pretty good. Now I want to just use the microphone on my laptop and just use the sound activation to record it into the computer. So I tested this with my voice, just a couple of “testing, testing’s” and what I am getting is something like screaming feed back. What can I adjust to stop that? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

BeehindBlueEyes

Turn off the computer speakers or plug in some headphones. Does that fix it?

The sound was in the recording, turning off the computer speakers would not have helped. A friend figured it out for me. Thanks anyway!

If you got the screaming feedback while you were speaking, then the sound is not in the cassette recording, but a result of feedback between the computer speakers and the computer microphone.

– Bill