What to use to transfer from Cassette player to Audacity?

Audacity Help Forum Windows
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I’m having difficulty transferring from a cassette player to audacity so, before I get into that I thought I’d start with the basics and make sure I’m using the correct type of cable and setting this up correctly. I have a cassette player with headphone jack. I have dell latitude E6540 laptop running Windows 10 and audacity 3.3.3. The cable I’m using has a stereo mini plug on both sides. And when I plug it into the laptop, I’m prompted to choose a device and the only 1 seems logical is the headset with microphone.

Will this setup work? If yes then I need to figure out why I can’t transfer but is NO, then I need to figure out what I need to do.

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Unless the DELL input can be toggled* from mic-in to line-in,

Then you need a gadget to convert a USB socket into line-in socket(s).
e.g.

1500×893 82.2 KB

Don’t feed headphone/line-out into mic-in : the signal is waay to strong.

[ * I had a DELL laptop where that was possible ]

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Yeah… Your computer has a combination headphone-out and microphone-in jack. The microphone input can “work” with a TRRS adapter, which has the extra microphone contact. But, it will be poor quality and mono.

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Ok… thanks for those answers. I have another laptop that’s my scratch laptop. Toshiba Satellite A665. It has a mic in port and according to the documentation the Realtek Audio Manager will allow that to be toggled between MIC and LINE IN. But it’s my scratch and it’s been on the back burner for a while. Needs some “software work”. LOL.

So, I guess I’ll move it to the front burner and see if I can get that working. Needed to anyway. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Thanks again.

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So I was able to get my toshiba laptop running with everything. When I plug in my line, I get the pop up allowing me to switch from Mic to line-in.
But I’m still have a problem. In audacity I’ve selected MME as the host, Line in as the recording device, 2 stereo as the channel and speakers as the playback.

It appears that I’ve I’ve successfully captured a sample recording due to the recording chart showing all the spikes but I’m unable to hear it when I play it, and there is no software play through. I did select that in the preferences.

So I exported the project to an MP3 file and that does play in Media Player.

Any suggestions on what’s going on to prevent sound in audacity?

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Well I feel awfully embarrassed here. I walked in the other room to get the power supply for the laptop and heard it playing though the bluetooth speaker in there. :smiling_face:
So the playback is working as it should. I’m just not working as I should! haha

Thanks for helping me figure out the line-in problem. Now I’ll go on to the next problem. Cleaning up this 54 year old recording

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