Audacity Forum

Hi all,

i'm trying to record an old audio cassette to mp3. i have the headphone jack from the cassette player connected to the mic input jack on my laptop.

the problem is that if i select 'Line In' on the audacity toolbar, there's nothing coming in (track flatlines along with monitor). if i change that to 'External Mic', i get left channel only and it sound like crap.

should i be using the 'Line In' setting, and if so, why isn't it working? Audoi I/O is set to the device, not micrsoft sound mapper.

thanks for your help.

AudioRash wrote:i have the headphone jack from the cassette player connected to the mic input

AudioRash wrote:if i select 'Line In' on the audacity toolbar, there's nothing coming in (track flatlines along with monitor)

The microphone input and the line input are different inputs. If you have plugged into the microphone input, then you need to select the microphone input in Audacity.
If you have Audacity set to record from the "Line in", then you need to be plugged into the "line in" socket. The problem is that your laptop probably does not have a "line in" socket.

AudioRash wrote:if i change that to 'External Mic', i get left channel only and it sound like crap.

That's because it is a microphone input. It is designed for one, mono microphone. Microphone signals are very small. If you plug a headphone output into a microphone input you will massively overload the input and it will sound bad. Also it will be in mono. It is probably worth noting that the microphone inputs of most laptop PCs do not work very well with microphones either, because they are generally very poor quality. This is why many PC laptop users use external USB sound cards. I use a Behringer UCA 202 - it's cheap and it works and the quality is a thousand times better than the laptop socket.