Audacity Forum

I just downloaded Audacity last night and everything seemed to go well. I'm trying to record my LP collection. I've hooked up the stereo cable to my record out on my stereo and plugged the other end into my line-in on my computer. When I play a record I hear the music coming through the computers speakers, but I can't get any response from monitoring bar in Audacity. I've selected my sound card in O/I and chose line-in from the drop down. Everything seems to be as described in the wiki, but no go. Any suggestions?

Have you actually tried pressing the red record button?

Monitoring is not turned on by default in Audacity (unlike your old tape deck or MD deck). And how you turn it on is not obvious - just click once in the recording meter bars, clicking in there again (while monitoring wil turn it off). Clicking in the recording meters while recording or playing will just reset the recoding meters max level.. This is poorly documented in Audacity - and the GUI doesn't help at all.

Another tip for you - you can re-size the meters by clicking and dragging the meter box. I have my meters spread across a whole screen width. The default settings are far too small for practical use.

WC

Thanks for the suggestions, tried moving the meter box but it didn't want to co-operate.
I've gotten the meter monitors to work by setting it to "stereo mix" not "line in". Now the recording level defaults to 0.1 and the red bars are almost always hitting the end no matter how low I set the volume on the source.I've tried going into the sound devices in the control panel of the computer playing with those setting but nothing seems to effect the recording levels, seems to have a mind all it's own and it wants everything loud.
Any tips would be appreciated.

jaxon727 wrote:I've gotten the meter monitors to work by setting it to "stereo mix" not "line in". Now the recording level defaults to 0.1 and the red bars are almost always hitting the end no matter how low I set the volume on the source.

We had a problem raised recently that was almost identical to this. It turned out that the computer had been incorrectly wired from new and the microphone input was marked as "line in" and the "Line in" was marked as "Mic in".