Need help getting started!

[MrDissonance]

I'm a reasonably experience computer user, but Audacity (1.2.6) is gonna make me crazy. It's not at all intuitive, and even tho I've played with it for a while, I can't seem to make any headway.

Perhaps someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong:

Here's my situation: I've got Win98 and a 5.1 sound card. Thru the control panel I removed the on-board hardware. I've got a tape deck plugged into the LINE IN socket on the sound card, and the speakers plugged into LINE OUT. When I play a tape I can hear it through the speakers.

In EDIT | Preferences, I've got Audio I/O Playback and Recording set to the sound card. I've selected 2 channels. I've got Uncompressed File Format set to .WAV. In Directories I specified where I want my recording to go.

My first step in trying to transfer a cassette to my pc is to click FILE : Save Project As. That brings up a Warning box; I click OK and then get a box labelled Save Project As.

I enter a (unique) name and click SAVE.

Then I start up the cassette deck and click the RED (record) button.

When I'm finished I click the Yellow STOP button.

When I check the folder where the audio input is supposedly saved, I find a file with the right name, but it's only 1K in size!

What am I doing wrong? Why do I not find an .aup files of appropriate size? It must be that I'm not SAVING or otherwise properly closing out the file. But where do I do that?

And when I want to convert the .AUP file to a .WAV file to export it, could someone please give me the SIMPLE set of instructins?

[steve]

It's been a long time since I've used Win98, but here goes....

My first step in trying to transfer a cassette to my pc is to click FILE : Save Project As. That brings up a Warning box; I click OK and then get a box labelled Save Project As.

Did you read the warning message? That message explains that you are saving an "Audacity Project" not a regular audio file. It also says that if you want a regular audio file you need to use one of the "Export" options.

[sp84]

And when I want to convert the .AUP file to a .WAV file to export it, could someone please give me the SIMPLE set of instructins?

To export an Audacity project, go to the "File" menu in Audacity, then select "Export As WAV".

From the box that appears, you will be able to select a folder to save the WAV file and enter a filename for the WAV file. Then click Save and Audacity will export your project to a WAV file.