Echo - - not wanted

[cmbarlow]

I installed Audacity, because I have a 25 year old cassette recording of my grandmother talking about her life in Ireland. I wanted to convert this to a mp3 file. For whatever reason, even when monitoring input, the sound is good quality, but there's a serious echo effect. I did not select "Echo" from the menu at all. Any idea what I can do to stop the echo? Also, is there a primer somewhere on how to compress the audio? A one hour recording, when converted to mp3, ends up being 63 Meg - - what should I do to compress that down? Thanks for your help and patience. Colleen

[alatham]

Open up Audacity and click Edit -> Preferences -> Audio I/O. I bet you have "Software Playthrough" checked. Make sure it's OFF. That should clear up the echo.

A 60 minute, 63 Meg mp3? Sounds about right, if you have it set to 128kbps, stereo. You can cut that in half by making it into a mono file (if it's just a 1 mic recording, it's probably technically mono already). If you still want it smaller, you'll have to go even lower on the mp3 quality setting. For a voice recording, 80kbps is probably going to be fine (depending on how noisy it is). Be aware that using a setting lower than 96kbps will change the sample rate of the audio, so any CD burning software you try to use will complain (but if you're making CDs you should work with wav files anyway).