Newbie here and going through a steep learning curve hoping to find some help/advise here. Apologies in advance for not having the proper lingo/terms down.
I am transferring a bunch of old DAT tapes with live music. I have been able to transfer my DAT source to my harddrive using a Behringer UCA202 audio interface. All is going well except that I have unbalanced channels with the Left channel showing clipping.The Right channel looks better, ie no clipping. See attached screen shot
-Q1- Can I just delete the Left channel and replace it with a copy of the Right channel?
Please give your version of Audacity and Windows (see the pink panel at the top of this page).
Yes although it is hardly a good solution you can use the Audio Track Dropdown Menu to Split Stereo Track then delete the left channel’s track. There is Effect > Clip Fix… which may help with reconstruction of mild distortion.
The DAT player is a Sony PCM-R300 connected through RCA Audio L/R to the Beheringer UCA202 input that connects to the laptop via USB. I cant recall the mic I used some 20 years ago but it was the standard mic that came with the Sony portable DAT player D7.
The audio sounds good but I just see the clipping on the left channel. To me it looks like the L channel is a copy of the R channel except that L is ‘louder’ and shows some clipping.
What output of the DAT player are you connecting from? If the DAT player has a headphones output you can control the level of that output (and rebalance it if the player has a balance knob).
Yes it looked like that to me too. So please check in Windows Sound as I suggested to see if you have the Behringer set to mono recording: Audacity Manual. Look in the green box in that FAQ. Windows usually sets USB recording devices to mono by default. If you set Audacity to record in stereo and Windows is sending mono then you get one of the channels duplicated in left and right of Audacity.
That should be a higher quality output than headphones as a rule, but it could be too “hot” and probably there is no way to control its level or balance.
I recorded these shows on a Sony D7 portable DAT recorder. The mic I used (cant recall model) was a small one that looked like a little mouse. Very rudimentary.
In some cases I would plug the DAT straight into the soundboard and for those tapes as well I can see that the L channel is louder than the R channel.
My question is regarding the wave maxing out at a specific constant level (looks like 0.7). Is this because I had a crappy recorder, or because the soundboard was too hot/loud or is it because I have a setting messed up?
