I am a new user of Audacity and have version 3.0.4 which is being run on Windows 7. I want to digitise some old audio cassette tapes of a band I used to be in, and have attempted to use an old, but still working, “ion Tape2PC” tape deck as the source. Running the play output from this deck down a USB cable and into my laptop and as the input to Audacity, I have followed all the manual instructions on how to set everything up, both in Audacity and on the laptop itself. This does enable recording as hoped, but if the Audacity recording volume is higher than around 0.04 - really low, given the available range is from 0 to 1 - then the signal is too far into the red and is distorted. To confirm this wasn’t just the level the old audio cassette was originally recorded on, I tried recording a bit of a mass-produced audio cassette tape, whose levels are typical as per the usual manufacturing processes. That also had to have the Audacity recording volume set really low - around 0.02 or 0.03 - any louder and the signal was again distorted. The tape deck has no gain control for play output, so this only leaves any other ways to reduce the gain, besides using the Audacity recording level slider. As outlined in the Audacity manual, to set this all up, among other things I did a right click over the laptop’s speaker icon, chose “Recording Devices”, right clicked over USB Audio Codec, chose Properties, and clicked on the Levels tab. This together with other adjustments as per the manual, has resulted in the expected “tie-in” between what that Levels tab shows, and the Audacity recording volume slider, and adjusting the record level using either of those, always changes the level of the other method as expected. Is there some other, independent way of bringing down the gain level of the signal coming down the USB cable from the tape deck into the laptop and thereby into Audacity?
Many thanks in advance,
NelsJ