Audacity Forum

Hi there

I hope you can help me with a problem. A friend of mine bought a new computer base unit off me. I copied all his files across from the old to the new computer. He uses audacity to record vinyl from his record player through his soundcard onto the computer. When we tried recording on the new computer the sound quality wasn't that good, so we decided to connect up the old computer. Bare in mind on the old computer everything was setup working perfectly with audacity.

When we tried the old computer the recording of the records was poor, where as before it was good. Nothing had changed on the computer. My friend has a turntable. There is a cable coming from the amp called a Y cable which goes into the Line In socket on the soundcard. The soundcard only has 3 sockets.....micophone, line in and speaker. When we try to record through the line in audacity is not picking up the music. It does pick it up through the microphone socket, but it is very loud and distorted, even with the volume turned right down.

Can anyone give a step by step idiots guide on what to look and for what to check, as we are both at the end of our tethers.

Thanks

Dave and Steve.

The best step-by-step idiot's guide can be found in this tutorial set in the Audacity 1.3/2.0 manual: http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... iscs_to_CD

Start off with that and if you still have problems then post back...

WC

soundnut wrote:When we tried the old computer the recording of the records was poor, where as before it was good.

Following on from WC's post - if you still have problems could you upload a short sample of this "poor" sound to the internet - just a couple of seconds in WAV or Flac format - so that we can hear what sort of "poor" it is.
If you don't have your own web space you can use a free file sharing service such as sendspace.com

thanks guys. i will follow the guide and get back to you. will try and upload a sample if possible.

thanks

Dave

soundnut wrote: When we try to record through the line in audacity is not picking up the music. It does pick it up through the microphone socket, but it is very loud and distorted, even with the volume turned right down.

It sounds like on your old configuration you could record from line-in, which gave a good quality recording, but with the new set up it it will only record from mic-in, which is poor quailty (distorted). If so you need to change the configuration so Audacity will accept line-in again ...

Setting Up Audacity

1. Go to Devices Preferences and at "Recording Channels", choose whether to record in stereo or mono
2. Immediately above, set the "Recording Device" and "Playback Device" explicitly to your built-in computer sound device or other sound device your cable is plugged into. Do NOT select "Microsoft Sound Mapper" or "Primary Sound Driver" on Windows machines. Then:
* Windows 7/Vista: the required line-in option will be a specific choice for your selected sound device (for example, "Line-In: Realtek HD Device")
* Windows XP or earlier or Linux: you will now need to go to the Mixer Toolbar Input Selector and select the required line-in input source
* OS X: if there is no explicit "line-in" recording device, go to the Mixer Toolbar Input Selector and select the required line-in input source there
3. If you cannot choose your input source as described above, or if the line-in input won't record, you can use the operating system mixer device to choose the required input. For instructions, see the further help for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux on our Wiki.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... p_Audacity

After reading the online manual (always helps!) we discovered that the recording device in Windows was set to mic instead of line in. After we changed that we were able to record from vinyl, although the sound was quiet, it was very good quality.

There is one thing my friend noticed. On his old computer, he sometimes recorded from an audio cd into audacity. Under Windows 2000 he set the input from line in to wave and recorded a song from the cd. The new computer has Windows XP and the option to select wave (from the cd) is not there anymore. We are using the same version of Audacity which 1.2.6.
Can anyone help on that. I hope that I explained ok!

Thanks

Dave

soundnut wrote:There is one thing my friend noticed. On his old computer, he sometimes recorded from an audio cd into audacity. Under Windows 2000 he set the input from line in to wave and recorded a song from the cd. The new computer has Windows XP and the option to select wave (from the cd) is not there anymore. We are using the same version of Audacity which 1.2.6.

1) The recording input options are down to your sound card and sound card drivers and have very little to do with Audacity.

2) You would probably do better to upgrade to Audacity 1.3.12 - it is a big step up from the old 1.2.6, but the interface should still be very familiar as much of the layout has been kept the same (See the "Tips, Tutorials an d Documentation" links at the top of this page, and/or the Manual in the Help menu of 1.3.12 as your first port of call for help with 1.3.12 - any other problems, call back here to the forum and we'll do are best for you

3) There is a much better way to extract music from audio CDs than recording. You can digitally extract the music - this is commonly called "ripping CDs". A good, free CD ripper is CDex http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/

I've read the initial start up piece.

I want to record from vinyl LPs. What is missing in your guide is where are the various descriptions can be found such as Sound Card, Audio I/O tab of Audacity Preferences (Devices tab in Audacity Beta. Is it the control panel, audacity itself.

An idiots guide/step by step- is what I require. What do you first, where do you go? Its not simple, its very confusing.

Richie wrote:What is missing in your guide is where are the various descriptions can be found such as Sound Card

Look here for how to connect your equipment to your computer: http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... _Recording

Richie wrote:Audio I/O tab of Audacity Preferences (Devices tab in Audacity Beta. Is it the control panel, audacity itself

You access Audacity settings through the Preferences menu item. http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... references

Richie wrote:An idiots guide/step by step- is what I require. What do you first, where do you go? Its not simple, its very confusing.

What, specifically, are you having trouble with in this tutorial? http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... iscs_to_CD

-- Bill