Audacity Forum

I just purchased a Grace Digital Audio player. It is a cassette player. I am trying to transfer music on a cassette tape to my computer. I am on Windows Vista. When I press the record button, it shows a blue wave across my screen which I assume means that the Audacity software is recording my music. When I try to play it back, no sound comes out. Help. It's been two days and no luck!

There does have to be actual blue waves, not a straight line.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/Audacity1_record.jpg

Does yours look something like that? I understand the red recording meters may look different.

Depending on your answer, we go down different paths.

Koz

I assume this is a USB device - the Grace Tape2USB - right?

If so .....

USB devices have a habit of hijacking the entire sound – output as well as input – and they don’t tend to have loudspeakers (hence “no sound”).

What you need to do is to direct the Windows sound output to your PC's soundcard Control Panel>Sounds and Audio Devices>Audio>Sound Playback - and make this setting to the PC soundcard.

You may also need to ensure that Audacity sends it output to the PC soundcard Edit>Preferences>Audio>Playback - and set this also to your PC soundcard. You may need to stop and restart Audacity for this setting to take effect.

Many folks fall into this bear-trap when they start out with USB/Audacity - I certainly did !

Update: actually I've just had a look on t'interweb at the specs for the Grace Tape 2 USB and I note that it has a built-in speaker for monitoring - so if that is the case then I am confused as to why you should get no sound monitoring on the Grace device.

WC

Further update: I just had a look on t'interweb at the manual for the Grace Tape 2USB - on page 16 it shows the Recording device set to the Grace unit and Playback directed to the PC's sound services as I described above. However it doesn't appear to tell you to check the box that says "Software playthrough ...".

I recommend you check that box and try again.

WC

Even if you check the box that instructs the unit to play the sound while recording, the volume control button is on the BACK of the Grace unit next to the USB plug-in slot. The volume control prominently on the top of the unit where all the other controls are is for the input volume. My bad.

Excuse me for jumping in on this thread, but my sound problem is when I *playback* the recording. I tried all possible combinations of the playback and record devices. The only ones that gave me any sound from my computer all had Realtek Digital Output for the playback device. However, the quality was really poor no matter which recording device I selected. It sounded like it was being severely muffled by a pillow or space aliens were landing. I also tried playback with the Grace unit both connected and disconnected to the computer because of the hijack problem mentioned below. Either way I could not get volume on playback.

Any other suggestions? Thanks.