Audacity Forum

Hi,

I'm attempting to digitize an old audio tape. The cassette player's earphone (TRS) port is connected to the computer's microphone port, and this seems to work after a fashion. However, even though the cassette tape is still in good shape and the player has an excellent quality, what arrives in Audacity is horrendous.

I've tried every different sampling rate available, and fiddled with the other settings as well, but I cannot get rid of the following problem:

When the recording (and the tape) is initially started, nothing is arriving at the microphone port (monitor shows a flat line), even while the recording is playing. If the TRS plug is removed from the cassette player, the music is played aloud, and there seems to be no problem at the player end. When the plug is then re-inserted (while the tape is playing), Audacity begins to receive the sound - it starts off fairly well, but within a few seconds, the volume quickly goes down, the noise and distortion gets worse, and after about 5-7 seconds it is impossible to hear anything. This repeats whenever the cable is removed and reinserted at the player end, but not if the cable is removed at the computer.

So far it sounds like a hardware problem, but it doesn't seem to happen with sndrec32 (which I really don't want to use). Can anyone enlighten me?

Arancaytar wrote:he cassette player's earphone (TRS) port is connected to the computer's microphone port,

Microphone ports are not really suitable for plugging a tape recorder into. As you say, it works in a fashion, but frequently it will sound horrible.

The problem is that a microphone input is about 1000 times too sensitive for the output of a cassette recorder. If you have a desktop machine, there will probably be a "Line in" socket which you should use. If you are on a laptop, you probably do not have a "line input" in which case you will need to get an external audio card. The Behringer UCA202 (or something similar) will do the job very nicely (for a cost of around $40 US/£20 GBP).

Laptop, indeed, so no Line-in. I have an old desktop PC around with a Line-in port, but it doesn't have a functional system right now. If it turns out to be necessary, I could use a Linux live CD to work with it.

But I'm getting quite "good" (perceived) quality with the Windows system sound recorder (although it's Mono, and it can only record about a minute at a time, so it's useless here). If that bare-bones program can cope with the over-sensitive port without any noticeable distortion (without even manually adjusting the sensitivity), how is it that the more advanced tool can't be configured to work with it?

You should be able to get the same results with Audacity as you do with Windows Sound recorder.
If you set up Audacity to use the Windows Sound Mapper recording input ("Edit > Preferences > Audio I/O"), then it will use the same audio set-up as Windows Sound Recorder, and the recording will be identical (but not limited to 60 seconds).

It's unusual if you get decent results with Sound Recorder, because of limitations of typical laptop sound cards. sound card. I believe that some laptops have combined microphone/line in sockets that can cope with the sensitivity problem, but even then they are not usually very good. Yours could be an exception, but if not, go for the external USB solution.