Hi. I had always recorded vinyl LPs this way: Audio Technica turntable to Sony receiver RCA out from Tape Out to Microphone on my Dell G5 desktop. Quality has started to drop so I decided to try using RCA to USB instead. I first used a USB-C that didn’t work. Upon research I found that Audacity doesn’t support USB-C. I got a regular USB to RCA cable and now it comes up in the device list as Microphone USB-C (it’s not) Audio but it doesn’t work. Tried different USB ports no luck. Tried changing MME to the different Microsoft options and tried every combination and got an error each time.
Actually the one I got was rated pretty well. And the Behringer is a pre-amp which I understand (from their site) isn’t necessary when going through an audio receiver.
I noticed you didn’t bother to say which one you have…
No. The Behringer is a digitizer. Your audio signal needs to be sampled and digitized (converted into 0’s and 1’s) externally to the USB port. This is why they are more expensive that a simple cable (there is a small computer inside).
So in the old days, the computers used to supply “line-in”. To save pennies these were removed.
Wasn’t avoiding listing the one I got I was just too lazy to pull up the link. In the spirit of asking for help and receiving it I will give the Behringer a try and report back.
That’s the wrong way to do it. The line-level signal from “tape-out” is about 100 times stronger than a microphone signal, and the mic input is normally mono (and often low quality, even with the correct microphone-level signal).
If your computer has a regular soundcard with line-in, that should work.
From what I found online about the Dell G5, “audio in” is on the back and it should work.
That should work too. It’s not “just a cable” because one end is analog and the other end is digital. There is a soundcard chip (or the recording part of a soundcard) built-into the cable, probably on the USB-connector end.
Audacity works fine with USB-C. Audacity gets it’s data from Windows and the drivers and it doesn’t know and doesn’t care where the driver is getting the audio data.
Virtually all “little USB audio gadgets” are plug-and-play with the drivers that come with Windows
That’s OK too. Sometimes the device doesn’t identify itself to Windows so Windows assumes it’s a microphone. It should work but you might have to make sure Windows and Audacity are configured for stereo because most mics are mono.
It is a G5 5090 and apparently this one does not have a line in which is why I was using the microphone input.
The USB-C was not recognized as a device at all no matter how many times I re-scanned (which was why it was ironic when it listed the regular USB as USB-C even though that didn’t work either).
I already sent the cables back and ordered the Behringer as jademan suggested so I don’t know the exact error message. Under MME there was no message it just didn’t pick up the sound. When I tried the two different Microsoft options with different loopback choices that is when I got the errors.
Hey jademan…I got the Behringer and it works…sort of. If I want to have the output back to my speakers in my AV system I have to have everything setup through the CD mode rather than Phono. When I use Phono as the output (Behringer out to receiver phono in) I get garbled noise. And even when I touch the jacks I get loud humming.
Everything works fine through CD which I guess isn’t really a big deal but I was curious if this sounds familiar and if there is anything I can do to set it to Phono. I also tried several combos of the Line/Phono switch on the Behringer. Also the turntable does not have a ground wire in case that matters.
Thanks for getting me this far and let me know if you have any other ideas.
Yes that is correct. You can only use one phono pre-amplifier at a time. The other way to do this would be to hook up the turntable as normal, then hook up to your AUX or TAPE output to the Behringer using the Line setting.