Stereo sound into Laptop

Special Interest Groups Recording Equipment
1

Hello everyone, I use Audacity for a few things once music is on my laptop, however this is more of a hardware question.

I have eventually realised that the mic socket on my laptop is Mono and only takes in left channel sound if a stereo plug is inserted.

Can I ask, how do I get stereo sound into my laptop from my hi-fi. ie to recored tapes and LPs to mp3.

I have seen cheap ‘sound cards’ with mic sockets but surely they will be mono as well.

I understand ‘line in’ sockets would be stereo but I don’t have one on this laptop.

As you may have guessed, I am not too good with computers, Can anything be plugged in to USB to get stereo sound in.

Thanks. Mike.

2

This set of tutorials willl be a good primer for you: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Tutorial_-_Copying_tapes,_LPs_or_minidiscs_to_CD

But the basic answer is yes you can. I use my old turntable with a small phono preamp and my old tape deck both connected to an external USB soundcard to my PC.

As your laptop only has a mic input than you are going to need one of the external USB soundcards - see this sticky thread for ones that we know work well with Audacity: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/sound-card-reviews/8375/1

WC

3

And this…

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/windowsRecording.html

Koz

4

Thanks for the replies everyone.

I am going to look through the links which you suggested shortly.

I have already found that the term ‘sound card’ might cover a few very different devices with different capabilities.

Thanks again. Mike.