Missing Part of Song

[deadzone1959]

I am using a Crosley Memories usb recorder to copy our old cassette library to computer before they are beyond salvaging. As an example, I recorded the Collective Soul song,"December", and the song sounds fine over the speakers on the Crosley, but when I listen to it while it plays over the computer speakers the background vocals towards the end of the song are so faint that I can barley hear them. I noticed this first when I played the files that I had recorded, before I had it set up properly so I could hear what I was recording over the computer speakers, on my MP3 player. I went through some of the posts and also reviewed the installation instructions and I am pretty sure I have all the settings correct. I am using a Toshiba A105 laptop, running Vista Home Edition. It has the Realtek Audio Manager software that it came with. Is this just more that the comuter can handle? It's not the whole song that gets quite, just the backgound vocals, like that part of the track is turned down, if you know what I mean. Thank you.

[kozikowski]

You have some of the symptoms of an odd playback problem, or maybe broken wire.

Pull down and play the Left-Right-Mono sound track from here...

http://www.kozco.com/tech/soundtests.html

It's a simple sound track that will do a quick test for your speakers. The last segment is intentionally damaged and is supposed to sound a little weird.

Try listening on headphones.

You can sometimes get problems like this if your fancy-pants sound system is set to simulate a concert hall or other performance venue.

And just because I usually forget this one, do you run Skype or other VOIP telephone service? They tend to be vicious about setting echo cancellation and feedback management. That makes a phone call work OK, but messed up music something fierce. Sometimes you can turn all that off in the Windows Control Panel.

Koz

[deadzone1959]

Thank you for the timely response. I played the audio and it sounds fine through headphones and the speakers. I may have not made myself clear before but the problem exists when I save the music as an MP3 file and then sync it to my MP3 player. The playback is the same on my car stereo, my dock, and earphones used with my MP3 palyer, also when the file is played on multiple computers. I don't use skype or anything like that.

[kozikowski]

Only when you save it as an MP3? Are you using a high enough bitrate? Are you getting other MP3 compression artifacts like gargling or bubbling?

http://kozco.com/tech/WAV-MP3.wav

MP3 works by suppressing parts of the performance that you "won't notice." If you compress hard enough, you might suppress valuable parts of the original show.

You can change the MP3 compression bitrate in Audacity 1.2 preferences. 32 is the minimum for a mono show, 64 for a stereo show, and most of the errors go away above 300. Restart Audacity to make sure the new settings stick.

Koz

[deadzone1959]

Actually, when I listen to the tape in a player including the Crosley player/recorder I hear the part. When I listen to it through Audacity while I am recording it, before I do anything to the track, the part is, not really missing, just very quiet. I have the option of recording directly to C-D. I'm going to try that and see if it records properly. That will at least tell me if the problem is with the recorder itself...maybe. I will post what I find out there.

[deadzone1959]

Ok. Recording dirtectly to c-d using the Crosley player/recorder and the song is normal. So the problem is somewhere between the recorder and Audacity. Maybe sound card isn't up to the challenge? I read elsewhere in these forums about external sound cards. A good one was like $100 so if you can help me solve this without that it would be great.