Sound distortion in recording

[jblanchard]

So I am using Audacity 1.3.x (Beta) on Windows Vista to record my DJ mixes. I connect directly from my DJ mixer into my laptop microphone jack. Up until recently I have never experience any problems doing it this way. Now when I play back my recordings the sound is fine for the first few seconds but then becomes strangely distorted. I have not changed any settings as far as I know and I am puzzled as to what the issue is. I tried uninstalling then reinstalling Audacity. I even tried a couple different audio interfaces, which I never had to use before, to see it that would clean up the sound but I still got the same distortion. I saw a couple other posts of people having issues similar to mine, but couldn’t find anything exact. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[whomper]

sounds like you are overloading the low level mike input with a high level line out from the dj thing andor your interfaces.

you might try a DI box.
A DI unit, DI box, Direct Box, Direct Input, Direct Injection or simply DI is an electronic device that connects a high impedance, line level, unbalanced output signal to a low impedance mic level balanced input, usually via XLR connector. DIs are frequently used to connect an electric guitar or electric bass to a...microphone input.

[steve]

DI boxes usually have 3 pin XLR connectors for the output that cannot be easily be adapted to suit the mini-jack input of a laptop computer.

Whomper is correct that one possibility is that you could be overloading a microphone input on your laptop. The audio input on laptop computers are frequently mono inputs designed for very low level microphone signals and can be easily overloaded by the much bigger signal from a mixer.

I even tried a couple different audio interfaces

What audio interfaces did you try?