Audacity Forum

You surely must have outputs which you would normally feed to the Pre-amp or contrrol unit of your hi-fi or music system, yes?

These should be line level and are normally a pair ofRCA sockets, red and white - this is the siggnal you should be able to feed to Audacity.

Can you clarify does your laptop have a line-in as well as a mic-in. If it only has mic-in then the line-level signal from your tape deck will be way to hot and will overload. If that is the cas then you should consider getting one of the external soundcards that work with Audacity - see: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=9477

The Behringer UCA-202 is fairly cheap, but is reckoned to work well by many posters on this forum. I use the Edirol UA-1EX (now superseded b y the Cakewalk UA-1G). It costs more than the UCA-202, but it has hardware gain/volume controls for the input and output signals - and it has a digital input (which could be useful with the digital output of your deck).

WC

The tape tape deck is in a midi hifi so its integrated and no line outs, only ins. My laptop only has a mic in, not a line in. The cassette player i bought which has all the wow and flutter has a usb connection.

Would the headphone out to USB definitely not work?

Mark

Yes it should work - the only downside is that the headphone out will have a lttle amplifier of its own, so you may get a little bit more noise, but I doubt that that will be noticeable. But the advantage is that you should have a volume control - so you should be able to work fine with the cheaper UCA-202

WC

Thanks for all your help on this and sorry to sound a bit thick but can i clarify......

The 3.5mm headphone jack will come out of the hifi and plug into the UCA-202 using what type of input connector?

Cheers

See this page: http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/UCA202.aspx

The inputs are an RCA pair - so you would need a stereo 3.5 mm minijack to RCA pair. ( i don't think the UCA-202 comes with such a lead).

WC

cheers dude.

Hi

Since my last post i bought the Behringer UCA-202. It's set up with a lead going from the headphone socket (No other output) to the devices stereo inputs and then into the pC and through audacity. There is no wow/flutter as the tape player is of good quality but there is an issue with signal. In the UCA-202 manual it states that the tape player volume should be up full, however as soon as i turn up above a very modest level the signal totally distorts. The volume on the UCA-202 seems to be redundant and is being bypassed. I am assuming that this is in some way to do with the issue of the headphone socket having its own mini amplifiers as mentioned in a previous post????? Is there a way to boost this signal in Audacity?

Cheers
Mark

Mark,

you should aim to be setting the recoprding level so that the waveform doesn;t do above about halfway in its window - or -6.0 dB, depending on which waveform view you use. I normally work with Linear voew on my wabform but dB scale on my meters.

Tip: you can expand the size of the metering toolbar by clicking and dragging on it (in 1.2 you have to do it every time you open Audacity - in 1.3 Audacity remeber your setting). This makes monitoring much easier. I have my toolbars stretched across the whole Audacity window.

Once you have finished all your editing and as the final step prior to export you can then boost the signal using Effect > Amplify. It will calculate a default which will take the signal up to 0dB - but I prefer to choke this back a little to a max. -2.0dB

BTW I would strongly recommend you upgrade to the latest Audacity 1.3.12 (an look out for 1.3.13 which should be out soon). You can get it from here: http://audacityteam.org/download/

WC

mcmac74 wrote: The volume on the UCA-202 seems to be redundant and is being bypassed.

AFAIK the volume control on the UCA-202 is to control the output level to the headphone socket for hardware monitoring of the signal. There are several UCA-202 users on the forum, so they may comment further.

The more expensive Edirol UA-1EX/UA-1G has 2 volume controls one of which manages the input signal level - the other is for the output/headphone socket.

WC

The UCA-202 is a simple "straight through" device.
This has pros an cons.

The advantage is that if the signal coming into the computer is too high, then it's because the signal going into the UCA-202 is too high. Similarly if the signal into the computer is too low, then it's because the signal going into the UCA-202 is too low.
Ironically this is also the disadvantage. If the device that you are recording on has no output level control and the signal going into the UCA-202 is too high or too low, then there's nothing that the UCA-202 can do about it. In this case you will either need to find/make some way to control the level of the signal going into the UCA-202, or get an Edirol (or similar) device that has an input control.

Unfortunately Windows Vista and Windows 7 can confuse the issue, as they are able to scale the signal from USB devices (I think this requires using "Direct Sound"), but this does not address the issue that if you overload the input of the UCA-202, the signal will be distorted.

Fortunately in your case the answer is simple - turn down the volume on the tape player.
Headphone outputs are not built to recognised standards - they're all different, so while some headphone outputs may need to be turned well up, other will need to be at a more modest level.

I agree with waxcylinder that a good recording level would be to aim for about half the height of the Audacity track (peak level around -6 dB). Also agree that Audacity 1.3.12 is much better than the old 1.2.6 version.