Downloading Audacity

[ccassedy]

I am trying to change my audio cassettes to CD;s. I installed Audacity and then tried to adjust the settings. The blue "squiggles" that show how loud the sounds are were way too high when I played the cassette. Unfortunately I must have pushed the wrong buttons, because the screen
changed and now it doesn't even show the "squiggle" bars. I've read some of the tutorials and haven't had any success bringing back the original format.
So I uninstalled the program and then tried it again. And it came back as the same messed up screen that I ended with before.

I really want to use this program to copy my cassettes. How do I get back to the original screen? At least then I can record the cassettes, if way too loud. (At this point it won't even record.)

Please help me to get Audacity ready to use for me.
Thank you for your help.

[kozikowski]

How did you connect the cassette machine to the computer?

Koz

[ccassedy]

Cassette player output to RCA cables to a Y connector to the microphone input on the back of the computer.

[pdun459]

I'm not sure what would cause the waveforms to disappear permanently. As far as reinstalling, after you uninstall, look for the Audacity profile folder and delete it to clear all previous settings. Depending on your operating system it'll be in Application Data or Program Data. Probably the easiest way to find it is just do a search of your system. Or you can just delete the audacity.cfg file that's in the folder.

Hopefully that'll take care of it but if it doesn't you might need to clean the registry after you uninstall and get rid of the leftover Audacity registry keys. One of them could be be causing it but I'd only do this as a last resort.

[DVDdoug]

The blue "squiggles" that show how loud the sounds are were way too high when I played the cassette.

If you connected line-out (or headphone-out) to microphone-in, you'll overload the mic input.

You need to connect to line-in (blue on your soundcard). *

Unfortunately I must have pushed the wrong buttons, because the screen
changed and now it doesn't even show the "squiggle" bars.

Is that when you record, or what?

What happens when you open an existing WAV or MP3 file?



* If you have a laptop, with only mic-in, you need the Behringer UCA202 or another audio interface with line-in.

[Gale Andrews]

I'm not sure what would cause the waveforms to disappear permanently.

It's usually because Audacity cannot write to the Audacity temporary folder. That location is noted at Edit > Preferences: Directories.

Sometimes Norton or other security programs can delete the Audacity temporary files. You must be very careful if using Norton. It may be best to turn off its "Windows temporary file cleaner" while using Audacity.

As far as reinstalling, after you uninstall, look for the Audacity profile folder and delete it to clear all previous settings. Depending on your operating system it'll be in Application Data or Program Data. Probably the easiest way to find it is just do a search of your system. Or you can just delete the audacity.cfg file that's in the folder.

Just to be clear, that works fine if the user has never run a 1.2 version of Audacity before.

Hopefully that'll take care of it but if it doesn't you might need to clean the registry after you uninstall and get rid of the leftover Audacity registry keys. One of them could be be causing it but I'd only do this as a last resort.

It's very unwise to edit the Windows Registry unless you know what you are doing.

As the documentation states ( http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/pr ... html#reset ) the safest way to ensure the 1.2 Preferences in the Registry are ignored is to reinstall latest Audacity and enable "Reset Preferences" half way through installation. This writes the audacity.cfg file to read only:

Code: Select all

NewPrefsInitialized=1

which tells Audacity to run with factory fresh preferences, ignoring the 1.2 Registry settings.

Note that there is a simple explanation of waveforms disappearing. It can happen if you delete a region then press delete again. The second delete removes all the project audio. Simply use Edit > Undo to get the project audio back.


Gale