Audacity Forum

Hi there,

I've recently installed Audacity onto a brand spanking new laptop (seriously, first programme installed after Windows). I'm trying to do some overdubs onto a rhythm section track previously recorded on a different laptop.

importing, cueing and recording, all is well and I'm wokring on trying to get the latency down to the minimum. However, a more pressing matter is the quality of the sound recorded into Audacity.

I'm using an Shure SM58, going straight into the mic Input, which on the previous laptop produced nice crisp recordings. But this time, all the recorded sound sound very lo fi (I am recording 44100, 32 bit floating point) it sound almost 8 bit (muffled and radio-ish)

Is there anything I can do about this from within audacity, or is there an app around somewhere?

Any help would be greatly appreciated...

Cheers,

Bas

You are probably overloading the Mic input on your new laptop. If it was ok on your previous laptop, then the mic-in on that one was probably capable of adjusting itself to adapt to line level input. Ideally you should be feeding in to a line-in socket, unfortunately - unfortunately most modern laptops do not have these fitted.

Therefore you may have to consider using an external soundcard. See thhis thread for reviews of ones that are known to work well with Audacity: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=9477

WC