Sudden Loss of Sound From Small Board

I’ve been using Audacity to record some demos lately, had everything running fine, learning the ropes and suddenly this evening I’m getting nothing. The best I can do it get a loud buzz if I turn up the gain, input volume, and main extremely high on my small board. To record, I’ve been sending my acoustic guitar and mic through a 4-channel Behringer board. From the board’s tape out jack, I run run a phono-to-mini-jack cord into my laptop’s mic jack. There’s a little noise, but I’m not recording “Dark Side of the Moon,” so it’s been great for getting my feet wet making demos. I’ve tested the board through my PA and it checks out fine, so it’s not a bad board or a bad phono-to-mini-jack cord. I’ve even tried a mini-jack cord out of the board to the laptop, but get the same results when I run the hardware test. My laptop is an older Dell and runs fine on Windows XP. Hopefully, it’s something simple and a problem other’s have experienced and fixed. Any advice is appreciated.

You may have fried the Mic-In of your laptop. A very noisy, buzzy show, or noise-only can be the protective shield of the audio cable not connecting all the way through to the soundcard. Start recording in Audacity and mess with the cable were it goes into the computer. Is there anywhere it more or less start working and then gets noisy again as you wiggle it?

As you figured out earlier, this isn’t the best connection to record DSOTM. The mixer output is pushing high-level, powerful, stereo and the computer is expecting a delicate butterfly, low level mono microphone. Not a marriage made in heaven.

Since you may need to do something now anyway, try the relatively cheap UCA202.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/peaveyUCA202Lenovo.jpg

This is also one of the certified sound devices that will allow you to do perfect overdubbing/sound-on-sound. So you win all over the place. Capitol Records is on line two for you.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/help/manual/man/tutorial_recording_multi_track_overdubs.html
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Overdubbing_with_a_Behringer®_UCA202_Stereo_bidirectional_USB_Sound_Card

Koz

Well, you confirmed what I thought might be the case. I was already considering a USB interface and now I have an excuse to get one. Thanks for your help.

Again, this particular USB adapter will do a headphone mix of the track you made yesterday and your new track today so you can do a good musical mix for overlaying multiple layers of sound. Not all adapters will do that, and you can’t do it in the computer. Koz