Recording from Tape - Poor Quality

[Revealed]

I bought Audacity 1.3.3 beta unicode with 1/4 inch jack plug to 3.5 mm headphone adapter socket, 3.5 mm stereo plug to plug lead. I have intalled the program ok and followed the instruction I was given to record from a tape.

I'm using a laptop with windows vista and am connecting a tape player from the headphones to the mic input on the laptop as instructed. I have the volume on my stereo at aound 20% of the maximum volume, there are no other settings on the stereo. I have the project rate at 441000Hz and have the channel settings to 2 stereo, all on the instructions.

When I record the sound quality is extremely poor. The tape itself is poor quality but nowhere near as poor as the sound I get when recording it. I even compare the quality of the tape to the quality on the computer and the tape is much better. I know that I'm unlikely to improve on the quality of the tape but this just gets really loud and really quiet and in some bits all you can hear is the drums.

How do I get this to sound any better?

[steve]

In what way is the sound very poor? Is it distorting? Is there a lot of hiss? Is it at the wrong speed? Something else?

[Revealed]

Heres a sample of it http://www.mediafire.com/?mtx75n2j2gqmuvx

The speed is ok but it's distorted, you can only hear the drums most the time and it goes very quiet at points too.

[steve]

I have the project rate at 441000Hz

Too many zeros. The default should be 44100 Hz and there should be no need to change it.

The file that you posted has a sample rate of 96 kHz (and plays too fast), but your sound card may not be capable of working at 96 kHz.

The recording level is way too high and the input of your computer is seriously overloaded - this is probably because you are pushing a relatively high level signal from the tape player into a microphone input. Microphone signals are typically around 1000 x smaller than the signal that you are pushing into it.

Although you have recorded as a 2 channel (stereo) track, the recording is actually mono (apart from distortion during the first second, both channels are identical). This confirms that input on the computer is designed only for a (mono) microphone signal.

To get a better recording you will need to use a sound card that has a line level stereo input. USB devices of this type are available quite cheaply. See here for some reviews: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=9477

Also, go into "Edit menu > Preferences > Quality" and set the default sample rate to 44100 Hz.