Audacity Forum

I am trying to transfer some reel-to-reel tapes to CD. Following the suggestion in the tutorial, I set the tape player output to 6 or 7 and the recording input to .2 or .3 to minimize tape noise, etc. This put the recording level red bars at about 70%-90% without hitting the top even on the loudest parts. However, the recorded waves are flat on top at some of the loud parts. They don't sound distorted (to me) on playback. If I turn the tape player down to 3 or 4 and increase the recording input level ti .6 or .7, the waves are not flattened on top, but I can't hear the difference. Before I burn a CD, I would like to know whether these flat tops indicate that there is distortion even if I can't hear it.

Most likely yes. When you have the tape player turned up to 6 or 7, it is probably overloading the input of your sound card.

Try setting the recording input level at max and lowering tape volume so that it won't clip. How different does that sound? Did it improve?

BTW, you posted on the 1.2.x part of the forum... are you really still using that version? On modern macs (running leopard or later) is strongly recommended that you upgrade to 1.3.12 (eventhough it's labeled beta, it's far more stable that 1.2.x, which actually is pretty unusable on leopard and snow leopard).

As noted in my original post on this topic, I tried increasing the input level and reducing the tape player output, but not to the degree a suggested by bgravito. It got rid of the apparent clipping on the track, but I couldn't hear the difference. I am running OS 10.5.8, which I think is the last upgrade to Leopard before Snow Leopard came out. I was leery of downloading Audacity 1.3 because is is listed as beta. Should I try it? I haven't noticed any instability, just the problem with too long file names.

You definitely should download 1.3.12. Despite being labelled as beta it is far more stable than 1.2.6, specially on mac's, on which there many known bugs and it's actually a surprise that you can use it without ever noticing any problem.

You are strongly encouraged to upgrade to 1.3.12, don't be scared by the beta label.

You can download it from here: http://audacityteam.org/download/beta_mac

It also adds a lot of new features. Worth trying.

You don't need to delete 1.2.x version. You can have both installed, you just can't run both at the same time. 1.3.x will open 1.2.x projects, but not the other way.