Audacity Forum

Hi need some help please to help solve an issue with recording from vhs tape to pc .Although this is not using audacity the software audacity may be able to rectify the problem. The only advice so far has been that all analogue tapes have hiss filtered out which when converting to digital allow the hiss to be audible.If anyone has any experiece in this area please let me know.Here is the problem:
Using "movies on dvd terratec edition" software is by Magix
recording vhs tape via vcr, connection is scart to adapter and then red white yellow to terratec grabby, and then from grabby to pc via usb (no s-video link on vcr)
when tape plays via tv ..all good
when recording to pc ...loud hiss during recording!
Why does this happen, and how can I stop this?
need to record loads of old vhs tapes to pc, and then later record onto dvd
thanks
rep

The last generation of VHS videotapes had VHS-HiFi in addition to the traditional analog, edge-of-the-tape sound tracks. VHS HiFi was a pretty good deal. It was a full-on FM processed stereo track burned inside the picture. For a while, it was the only way to record top quality stereo audio that didn't cost as much as a Buick.

I have personally created sound masters and recorded them on a VHS-HiFi machine -- for two hours.

However.

Because the sound signal was burned into the picture, you couldn't scan in HiFi and if there was anything wrong with the picture at all, the machine would throw up its little hands and drop to the conventional audio tracks. Which were terrible.

If you have an extended play videotape with no VHS-HiFi, the sound tracks were very noisy (FFFFFFFFFFFF) and had the quality of a bad answering machine or cheap personal voice recorder. Worse, if the tape was right on the edge, the machine would pop in and out of HiFi as the show went along. Very annoying.

And perfectly normal.

You can't fix any of those problems in Audacity.

Koz