Newbie trying to get this MAYA22USB interface to work!

Greetings!
Please let me begin by saying that I am a complete novice at this. I have old cassette tapes (of relatives long gone, but not forgotten) and am trying to digitize them. I already spent hours with B&H Photo tech support and have had multiple email exchanges with tech support from the company that makes the interface.

The interface is MAYA22USB. I have that connected to my dual cassette player via RCA audio cables. Then, I have the MAYA connected to my MacBook Pro, using MacOS Big Sur version 11.5.2. I am trying to use Audacity 3.0.4.

At first, no audio was coming into my Mac at all. When I went to System Preferences and then Sound, MAYA appeared there, but there was no visible input when I played a cassette. The same thing with Audacity: I selected MAYA as the input (as the Recording Device, next to the microphone icon) and also selected Line In on MAYA’s panel. No audio was coming in.

Next, I tried this same set up on my old PC. I downloaded the software for the Windows X and it worked! Audio came through MAYA and into Audacity and I was able to record it and hear it using headphones attached to the Mac. The problem is that this is a very old PC (it takes forever to turn on ) and I really don’t want to use it; I want to use my Mac.

So, I decided to give the Mac set up one more try. I attached everything just as before. This time, though, when I played the cassette, I could see that audio was coming into the Mac when I went to System Preferences and then Sound. So, audio is coming into my Mac, now! However, my other problem remains: although audio is coming into my Mac, I still see no audio coming into Audacity.

What am I doing wrong? I don’t have headphones with a big jack to fit Maya, so I’m just going by the visual appearance of the audio lines moving to determine whether audio is coming in.

Please forgive my very limited knowledge. I would greatly appreciate any advice. Thank you!

Gussie

I’m a Windows guy, but just one thing…

I could see that audio was coming into the Mac

Did you actually hear the sound? (I don’t know about the Mac but on a PC you can configure Windows to play whatever is plugged through the computer speakers without any application running.)

Or have you plugged the tape deck into your stereo to make sure there’s really a signal coming out?

Apple > System Preferences > Sound > Recording.

How many different things do you have in that panel? One of them must have been your MAYA22USB if you saw the sound meter jump. It may say USB Audio CODEC. It might say MAYA.


Here’s a Mac trick. Shift + Command + 4 and the cursor will turn into a cross-hair. (Cancel with Escape)

While it’s a cross-hair, you can draw a box around something on your desktop and the Mac will take a picture of it and put it on your desktop.

Post it on the forum. Scroll down from a text window > Attachments > Add Files > Choose something > Open.

Screen Shot 2021-09-15 at 6.24.35 PM.png
Write down the name of the thing that made the sound meter jump. Close the panel

Launch or restart Audacity. Look at the little window next to the microphone and see if that same name is posted there. Select it.

Click on the recording sound meters which starts them monitoring. Play a tape. Do the meters bounce?

Koz