Audacity Forum

I have a microphone unfamiliar to me marked Nady SP5 from the Starpower series, a registered trademark. It looks like an onstage device.

I plugged it in to the red socket on the back of my computer, which has a Gigabyte S Series GA-EP45-DS3R-DS3 motherboard, or one such.

I played with the icons in control panel, and highlighted something that looked like the input.

Silence resulted.

Can anyone tell me where to find advice that will make this work so I can record narration on my Audacity setup, over a musical audio track, then pick it up in Soundslides Plus?[[/size]

That microphone appears to be a cheap knockoff of a Shure SM-58. Assuming it's working, the trick is to get the pins in the connector adapted to your sound card. I don't know that Radio Shack makes an adapter that does this, I always and up making my own. Microphone pins one and three are connected to the shield and pin two is connected to the tip of the 3.5mm connector that plugs into the pink connector of the sound card. We do that at work and it does what it's supposed to do, subject to the quaity of the sound card.

However, This is assuming the pink connector on the sound card is, in fact the Mic-In connection. We bought a series of sound cards where it isn't. Consult your instructions or look on the sound card connector panel with a powerful flashlight. It will be a little microphone symbol with an arrow pointing in.

Many people with this combination give up and buy a USB sound mixer/MicPre like the Behringer or Edirol units (whose part numbers escape me). The really cheap, inexpensive way out that doesn't cost very much for good quality is a USB microphone straightaway.

I'm looking for the Microphone Preamp numbers.

Koz

http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic ... pre#p19859

Koz