Hi all, I’ve had this problem before with audacity or rather me. Please can anyone help. At home I’ve got 2 pioneer CDJ decks, hooked up to a pioneer DJM600 mixer. I recorded a set of mine last night. The music style is techno, quite driving, bass heavy. I saved the mix after recording it in audacity. My laptop was linked to the mixer for recording. I’ve played back the file and the bass is so overpowering even on low volume, it causes the whole set to crackle and distort and you only have to turn my ipod up to 40% volume before it’s you cant listen to it as it distorts too much. I’m obviously doing something massively wrong. My tunes are bass heavy, and I’ve turned down the input volume to 0.3, same problem happens. Is it that my laptops soundcard is too poor? Am I setting the volume too high somewhere else? As I play my mix out of my room speakers and in my headphones, it sounds absolutely fine, yet when I play back the recording it sounds awful and cant be used. Any help / advice is appreciated. I hope i’ve explained this ok.
How are you connecting the mixer to the laptop?
Does your laptop have a line-in port? Or are you connecting it to the mic-in?
Mic-in port is not suitable for line-in level signals…
If that’s the case consider buying a line-in → usb adapter… The behringer uca-202 is often recommended here on the forum…
I think I may have run into this problem before.
The mixer should have a “Tape Out” which is the show without the room, Eq, and effects boosting. This will give you a “flat” recording that should just sound OK. When you run this show back through your music system, the room should sound exactly like it did the first time.
However.
If you recorded the mixer main output with the effects and boost already in it, the playback will give you two boosts. It’s probably enough to shatter windows and scare the cat.
So you can record an effects-less show, or turn the effects off for the playback.
Koz
And yes, if you’re using the Mic-In of your laptop, you can’t do that.
Koz
Hi all thanks for replies, it’s appreciated. Yes you are correct I am running a cable from my booth monitor I think that’s what it’s called, at the back of the mixer into mic in on the laptop. However I have used this method before for recording a live set at a club night I ran and it recorded fine for the first two nights, terrible for the third. I’ve obviously done something different but as I got it right the first time I can’t think what I’ve changed. Obviously you guys have vastly more experience than me on these matters I don’t know if it’s relevant but there is also an amp going into the mixer. Having slept on this I think too much bass was prob the wrong wording it should have said far too distorted. Thanks
Also I don’t know if this is relevant. But I have a booth monitor knob on the mixer. My recording cable is going from laptop to booth monitor in the back of the mixer. The booth monitor knob has a 0 db symbol on the right and what looks like a minus sign then an eight in it’s side on it’s left. The knob was set in the middle of these when I recorded. I’ve explained that as best as poss, apologies if it sounds confusing.
What laptop do you have and what operating system are you running?
You’ll hardly get any gound sound from a mic input. It’s expecting a tiny fragile signal from a mic, not a powerful line level signal, it will amplify it a lot and cause a lot of distortion.
Some laptops, such as macbooks have a mic/line input, that means it can selectively handle both mic and line level signals, but most laptops don’t are prepared for mic level signal only.
I strongly recommend getting an usb adapter such as the berhinger uca 202, you’ll notice an huge improvement in sound quality.
You may also run into the problem that newer Windows machines also have voice conferencing software running on the Mic-In. They try to tailor the volume and fidelity automatically so you can do conference calls much better. This usually kills straight sound recording.
It’s not so much that Mic-In doesn’t work, it’s that it’s unstable. Some computers are OK with the painful mismatch, many others aren’t. Some are OK with it on Thursday and Portuguese Holidays – in other words, unstable.
Mic-In is also Mono by the way, not Stereo.
We send many people over to buy a UCA202 or equivalent to make high-level, Stereo, Line-In work.
Koz
We got plenty of holidays so they’re stable very often 
But you don’t have one every day, and how many of them fall on Thursday?
Koz
Depends on the year… If it’s a lucky year we can get a few on tuesdays and thursdays and make the ‘bridge’ to the weekend and have a 4 day weekend 