Audacity Forum

Hi. I'm a PC, my sister's a Mac. I'm trying to help her record from her tape recorder onto her Mac. I believe it's a MacBook Pro running OS X.
I believe this might be possible using a headphone extension cable and USB audio adapter. The idea would be to plug one end of the cable into
the headphone port on her tape recorder and the other end into the microphone input port on a USB adapter such as Syba SD-CM-UAUD.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812186035

Any ideas? Any pitfalls? Could this damage her Mac?

By the way, the purpose is for her to record our telephone conversations. We're using this particular tape recorder mainly because of its ability to capture telephone conversations with pretty good quality sound. Anyway, the volume levels should be fairly low (is this important?).

Working way too hard.

Plug one of these between the Headphone Out of the player and the Line-In (circle with two black arrows pointing in) on the Mac.

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index ... Id=3433875

Make the Mac pay attention to the Line-In instead of the Built In Microphone...

Apple > System Preferences > Hardware > Sound > Input > Line-In

Close the System Panel and start Audacity.

Audacity > Preferences > Quality > 44100, 16-bit
Audacity > Preferences > Audio I/O > Recording > 2 channel (Stereo), Built-In Input.

Close the panel and restart Audacity.

Record your shows. You will need to set levels so the loudest part of the show never hits "1" on the blue waveforms, or "0" on the Audacity bouncing light sound meters.

Export As WAV when you get a show you like. Audacity doesn't Save sound files.

Let me know where you get stuck, if at all. The Mac built-in sound services are far better than most external sound cards.

Koz