Audacity Forum

Hello All,

To start, I'm relatively new to audio recording, so I apologize if this should be an easy answer, but I've dug around a bit online and haven't found anything on it.

I'm recording church services using a Sound Blaster Live 24-bit sound card and Audacity, and stumbling through issues (mostly due to my inexperience) and learning the job as I go. At the moment the issue on the table is that when I use "Line In" to record in Audacity, my audio clips at half the volume it does when I use "Microphone." That is, with "Microphone" selected, I get audio just fine (if a bit loud) and if I crank the output on the sound board too high, I get clipping at the top and bottom of the track's display like I would expect, at 1.0 and -1.0 on the scale on the left. If I select "Line In," however, clipping occurs at only 0.5 and -0.5, apparently giving me half the spectrum to work with. Is this normal, or is there a way I can fix things to use the whole spectrum?

Like I said, audio is a good deal louder on "Microphone" and a bit too sensitive which is why I want to use "Line In," which seems to work great except for this possible issue. The input comes from two Main Out RCA jacks on our Mackie Onyx 1640 sound board converted into mono, splits to go to another device and the computer, goes into the only input port on the sound card, and is being recorded in mono using Audacity. I'm drawing a blank on other info that might be pertinent, so if you need to know anything more about our setup, just ask and I'll fill you in.

Any help anyone can offer is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Without getting into voltage levels and audio standards, a big different between Mic-In and Line-In is that one's stereo and one isn't.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audioconnecto ... ctors.html

You neatly sidestepped this problem by having a mono show to begin with.

<<<goes into the only input port on the sound card, >>>

The sound card only has one place to plug in? So there's a software control panel that's supposed to switch between the two services?

The holy grail of audio sound cards is to have one socket for everything, but that's not likely to happen because the two are so different. In the grown-up sound world, microphone level is considered to be about a thousand times lower than line level. (-55dB versus +4dB for the engineers) To put that in perspective, that's like the difference between the high voltage wires over your house and a flashlight battery. The two are reeeeeely different.

So what the card makers have been doing is fudging both. They're assuming microphones are louder than they really are and line level is a lot lower than it really is. It's rough to complain about that when nobody wants to pay any more than $8-US for a sound card.

No doubt the Windows people will gallop to the rescue, but let's see how far I get. Can you ever get Line Level up to +/- 1 under any circumstances? I'm talking about sneaking in at midnight when there's nobody there and set the sound mixer to way lower than normal, and then turn the sound card up in the Windows Sound Panels? It doesn't matter if you can never actually use the system like that, I'm interested in being able to get it to work at all.

[time passes]

I thought so. I have a Sound Blaster Live card in one of the PCs. It's got a festival of inputs. The Line-In is the second connector down and it's blue. The next down is pink and that's Microphone In. You do need the Blaster software to straighten this all out. Windows drivers will have no idea how to use this card.

I use it for stereo line level recording all the time and it works perfectly.

There is one difference between us. How did they get your mono? Some mixers will give you a serious volume reduction if you just jam the two L and R wires together.

Koz

I'm assuming that you are using the internal version of this sound card and not the USB version.

It's been a while since I used a SB card on Windows, so apologies if this is not 100% accurate.

Look near the system clock for the icon for the SoundBlaster Mixer (may be called "Creative Sound Mixer" or something similar).
On the right hand side of the mixer is the recording level slider - by default this is set to record "What U Hear", but you should change this to "Line In". There is a tiny little triangle near the top of this slider (they like to make this easy ). Click on that triangle and you should get a menu that allows you to change the recording source from "What U Hear" to "Line In".

Now move the record level slider to maximum.

Open Audacity and click once on the recording meter to activate it (or Right Click and select "monitor input"), then with the volume turned down on the mixer start a sound source (a CD player connected to the mixer would be ideal, but you can use a microphone if you don't mind saying "1, 2, 1, 2, testing, 1, 2....." for the next quarter hour).

Check the input level on the mixer (you may be able to meter the "pre fade level"), then gradually turn up the volume that is being sent to the sound card and you should see the Audacity recording meter come to life. Adjust the level until the loudest peaks just reach 0dB, then back it off a bit so that the loudest peaks are below 0dB.

You should now be set to roll.

kozikowski wrote:I have a Sound Blaster Live card in one of the PCs. It's got a festival of inputs. The Line-In is the second connector down and it's blue. The next down is pink and that's Microphone In.

Ah, the good old days when SoundBlaster cards were the bees knees, when beer cost twopence a pint, when you could buy fish and chips and a bottle of real lemonade for the family and still have change from a shilling........ [Steve wakes up abruptly]
Cost cutting. They've done the unspeakable and combined all inputs (microphone, line and digital) into one mini-jack socket, and use software switching to select what happens to the input.

Alright, this gives me some great info to work with. When I installed the driver, I only installed the driver itself, and left the mixer program off to keep my clutter of useless programs to a minimum. I'll get that program installed and play with it a bit and see if that doesn't fix things, and I'll post back when I get that done. Thanks for the help so far everyone!

Just a quick reply since I never did get back after my last post. I wound up getting a sound card with a dedicated line-in, and this problem was solved. Thanks for the help!