Audacity Forum

Hello,
I used to do all my editing on a desktop, no problems, everything sounded good. I now have to do everything from my HP Pavilion laptop. I am trying to edit mp3 that I own on my laptop. I can hear the recording, it just sounds really, really bad! I have tried using a patch cable on the sound jacks blue to green. That did help a little but the recording still is bad. On my desktop PC I never had one problem, what am I doing wrong? any help would be apreceiated!!!

Windows Vista OS.

I was able to get a much better recording. I had the patch cables in the wrong jacks. And my ouput level was way too high, turned it down almost all the way and the sound quality increased by a bunch!!

I couldn't get the on-line information to tell me anything about the laptop, but most laptops don't have High-Level, Stereo, Line-In connections. They have Microphone-In which is way more sensitive and easy to create overload damage. It's also mono.

Are you sure you have both a pink and a blue connection on the laptop, or are you assuming it would be blue if it had a color but it doesn't.

You fell into a very common complaint that you had to turn the sound levels all the way down to make anything work right. You don't have to do that if your connections match.

If you don't die from the overload problems, you may eventually discover that you're only recording the Left side of your stereo shows.

Koz