First, let me say that I love Audacity. I can now record my vinyl and make Mp3’s. However, I have 2 challenges. First, I am using my new Toshiba Laptob that has plug ins for a Mic and Headphones. Which should I use ? I have been using the Mic plug in and I thought that it was fine until I listened to the cd that I made from it. There seems to be no base or bottom. Everything works fine but I don’t know how to make it sound like a normal mp3…help!!!
It sounds as though you are plugging your record deck direct to the PC - it this is the case then you aren’t getting the necessary RIAA equalisation applied.
What you need to do is to plug the deck to a pre-amp or amplifier into the phono inputs and then feed the outputs to Audacity. The phono stage will apply the RIAA equalisation and boost the bassy bits which were deleliberately modified by the recording engineers in the recording/cutting process (basically to stop extreme excursions of the stylus on loud, sudden bass sections).
BTW you will almost certainly get better results if you use an external souncard (Behringer and Edirol amongst others make them) rather than using the soundcard in your PC.
WC
Ok, Actually. i have my turntables connected to my 5 channel mixer and from the mixer I go into the pc. I can control the bass, gain, mids all from my mixer and when I listen to what im recording i adjusted them but it still doesn’t seem to help. Maybe I should look into the external soundcard as suggested.
Vinyl playback requires equipment with the proper RIAA EQ curve applied to it. The best way to do this is to buy a phono pre-amp. If your mixer (not sure what you mean by that) has a Phono input, then it will work fine. That will give you a Line level signal with the proper EQ applied. Unfortunately, your laptop doesn’t have a Line Input. You’ll need an external (USB, FireWire) soundcard with a Line In. The Mic input is only useful for those crappy computer Mics (which aren’t useful for anything except recording static).