Recording is very quiet and lot of hiss

Hi

I am using a Super USB Casette Capture to record old cassettes and convert them to MP3. I have used it before with the previous version of Audacity and some of my recordings are super quality and others are awful - the recording is really quiet and there is a lot of hiss on the tape and I am getting the same again now. I appreciate the cassettes are old but they play a lot better than the recording is coming out. I have tried using normalise, amplify, noise reduction but I am really just hitting and hoping with these buttons - I don’t really know what to do with them, can someone please tell a very untech person how to improve the recordings slightly, they don’t need to be amazing but I would like to be able to hear the stories and songs from the tapes without the hiss and at a reasonable volume. I have turned the recording volume up full which may contribute to the hiss but otherwise I cant hear at all. Please help!

Please read the pink panel at the top of the page and give us the missing information.

Possibly you are not recording from the correct input. You need to set Audacity in Device Toolbar to record from the correct USB Audio CODEC that belongs to the cassette player.

I suggest first you obtain Audacity 2.1.0 from http://audacityteam.org/download/windows if you don’t have it already.

Then have a careful read of this page and see if it helps:
Recording with USB turntables or USB cassette decks - Audacity Manual.

Gale