cassettes play fine but record poorly

[rpicucci]

Hey,,,,

Thanks all I found my problem, I have two sound cards in my pc.. was plugged into the wrong one and the correct one wasn't configured right...oh the thrills of Windows 7...but it works great now....now for a tutoring session..easy stuff really once you know how...Thanks again...reading the forum gave me the idea to check hardware and OS interface..keep up the good work...

Caio....

[sueprano]

Do you have an iPod or other music player? Can you plug that into the blue socket and see if that plays OK. If you set normal headphone playback, that should give you reasonable Line level.

It is remotely possible that the boombox is broken. I can generate other completely wacky ideas, but we're seriously getting into science fiction -- which we may need to do. After we shave Occam, there may not be much left.

Koz

Oh, wow, this is weird - recording off the iPod gives me a nice-sounding recording, but the waveform is almost non-existent! (Input Level in Audacity still set to the maximum, volume on iPod set to the middle) Before I played it back I wasn't sure I was getting anything at all!

Sueprano

[sueprano]

Me again - I think the problem is actually in my boom box. I'm a little embarrassed to report that it never occurred to me to just play the tape straight through the boom box and check it that way - it had sounded OK in the past, so that was that. But I disconnected it from the computer and hit play, and sure enough, sounded terrible, hit stop, hit play, it then sounded good. Stinks because other than this little quirk, this is the best-sounding player I've got - even better than the fancy 2-player Sony deck that used to be part of our main audio setup....

Sigh.

[steve]

I think the problem is actually in my boom box

This might help: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Recor ... d_Cleaning