info request-first exp w/Audacity

[smg]

Glad to find these forums.....what's going on is,my friend(who owns a computer,etc)and myself(musician/recording engineer not really that computer-literate re-Audacity factors)are working on transferring some audiocasette tracks to mp3 to upload on soundclick,myspace,etc.......we were able to download 2 different free versions of the program,set it up to record,play the track through the system and hear it as it(ostensibly)recorded but when it came to actually playing the recorded track back we got no results.......messed around with "file save" and "export audio" type things(actually I watched him and tried to figure out what was going on),he saved some files to open,etc;in short a lot of computer-specific stuff that,to myself used to dealing with rec/playback as a simple operation,seemed amazingly overcomplicated.....is there an easy way to break this process down?It would have seemed to me that the playback should have occurred immediately after rec. it, using the controls as if it was a tape recorder........any help greatly appreciated,thanks!

[steve]

Check out the "Tips" and "Tutorials" links at the top of this page - there's a good range of useful information to help you get started with the program.
Note that the 1.2.6 version is now very old and can be unreliable on modern systems so you will probably be better following the 1.3.x releases until Audacity 2.0 is finally released.

[smg]

Seems like what's going on is,although we are able to hear the track play and see the "line move" as time elapses,there is no movement of the red monitor showing sound going in digitally;we changed the sound card,are going to deal with the drivers,are we on the right track?

[steve]

Difficult to say for certain, but you are probably on the right track.

You can set up which device Audacity uses for playback and recording in Preferences (In Audacity 1.3.x "Edit menu > preferences > Devices")
After that, Audacity is at the mercy of your computer sound system.

The computer sound system can usually be set up from the loudspeaker icon near to the time/date. If you can't set it up there, go to the Windows Control Panel and look in "Sounds and Audio Devices".