Audacity 2.11 Linux Mint Getting Nowhere with Audacity

[gibbo50]

Hi
I have Linux Mint 17.1 and Audacity 2.11 installed
I am trying (with no luck whatsoever and 5-6 hours of my life wasted on it so far) to get Audacity to record a cassette from my stereo to my computer an operation i carried it on Windows XP in about 2 minutes
have no idea what settings audacity should use to carry out this operation ..I have had the following failures so far
1) no sound from the speakers
2) Sound from the speakers for about 6 seconds then stops and cuts out
3)No sound from the WAV File recording
4) latency Correction warning coming up
5) Noisy clicking recording so loud it ruins the recording

I have looked through the Audacity manual but to be honest it makes no sense whatsoever
If Anybody can impart some advice i would be truly grateful pretty much a newbie on Linux/Audacity matters
Thankyou

[Gale Andrews]

I have Linux Mint 17.1 and Audacity 2.11 installed

Is "2.11" a typo for 2.1.1? Where did you get that version of Audacity from?

I am trying (with no luck whatsoever and 5-6 hours of my life wasted on it so far) to get Audacity to record a cassette from my stereo to my computer an operation i carried it on Windows XP in about 2 minutes

have no idea what settings audacity should use to carry out this operation

..I have had the following failures so far
1) no sound from the speakers
2) Sound from the speakers for about 6 seconds then stops and cuts out
3)No sound from the WAV File recording
4) latency Correction warning coming up
5) Noisy clicking recording so loud it ruins the recording

You choose the input you want to record from in Device Toolbar.

Linux Mint uses a sound mixing API called "PulseAudio". When you select the "pulse" or "default" recording device in Device Toolbar, you are choosing whatever is the current PulseAudio input.

To make it easy to select the input that pulse uses, open a terminal and install PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol):

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

You could also try going to http://community.linuxmint.com/software ... avucontrol and pressing the "Install" button but I am not guaranteeing that will work.

You can also choose an input from the built-in sound device if you choose the (hw: 0, <some number) recording device in Device Toolbar. In this case, instead of using pavucontrol to choose which input is being used, you would use ALSAmixer to choose the input that the (hw: 0, <some number) device refers to.

Choosing pulse or the (hw:) device has different pros and cons. Pulse can freeze up, though there are workarounds to set different latency values. Choosing the (hw:) device lets you access the hardware without going through the pulse mixing layer, but that will not work if another application than Audacity is using your sound device.

However there is a more fundamental question to begin with - does this computer have a stereo line-in, separate from the mic input? If not, then you should buy a USB interface with a stereo line input, such as one of these:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Recom ... Interfaces.

Otherwise, you will probably get mono and/or distorted recordings.

A USB recording device shows up in Device Toolbar as (hw:1,0) assuming that is your only external recording device. It is then usually simplest to select that (hw:1,0) device to record from.

Gale