Recording maximizes at 0.5, playback works

[kozikowski]

<<<I guess it's the same if I just plug it in there?>>>

It's not the same. The High Level Line-In should work. It's designed to handle the signals you have.

The Microphone Input is designed for a really tiny electrical signal and it's easily damaged if you connect it wrong. It's pretty extreme. The difference in signal level between the two connectors is almost 1000 to 1.

Oh, and Mic-In is mono, not stereo.

Koz

[pepineros]

I meant instead of setting the mic-in to 'act' as a line-in (which you said, or at least that's what I understood) I could just plug the jack coming from the pre-amp into the line in of my laptop.

Also, I know a bit about the difference between microphone and line signals, but I've been recording on both mic and line inputs now and mic yields far better results. Strangely, the input levels are almost the same (mic is a bit higher), but when recording using the line-in, I get a lot of very annoying little clicks - the same you get when you unplug your mic while recording. My guess is that somehow the line-in got damaged, not the mic-in, and it loses contact with the jack for an instant, giving me that kind of 'click'. (Or maybe it's another reason, anyway I'm having trouble with recording through line-in.)

[kozikowski]

<<<My guess is that somehow the line-in got damaged, not the mic-in, and it loses contact with the jack for an instant>>>

My guess is it's picking up electrical trash from inside the computer. They warn you when you install a sound card to keep it as far away form other cards and electronics as you can get. I had one sound card that would tell me when the hard drive changed speeds by putting noise in the performance.

So the Line-In is noisy and popping and has very nearly the same volume as the Mic-In and the Mic-In overloads at 0.5.

Should you be shopping for a sound card? Audacity is a complete slave to the computer that's running it and it doesn't apply effects of any sort during Capture. If the bitstream is damaged going in, then that's the way it is.

Koz

[pepineros]

<<My guess is it's picking up electrical trash from inside the computer.>>

Ready to accept that, but why is it only affecting the line-in, not mic-in? The inputs are about half an inch seperate.

I think I should be shopping for a sound card (this laptop cost about €300,- when I bought it, about 1 year ago, so I assume it has a rather crappy soundcard), but then again there's a lot of stuff I could buy to upgrade the sound quality I get. Still, I'm a little closer to a solution and keeping the input level below 0.5 and amplifying afterwards works for now.

[kozikowski]

<<<Ready to accept that, but why is it only affecting the line-in, not mic-in?>>>

Because the protective shield on the Line-In connector is broken. These services are all unbalanced and if the shield goes away, so goes half the signal and any protection that might have been there.

The Mic-In service is being terrifically overloaded, so it's volume is turned down as far as it will go -- or it's damaged, making it less likely to pick up trash.

http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=9477

Koz

[kozikowski]

<<<Still, I'm a little closer to a solution and keeping the input level below 0.5 and amplifying afterwards works for now.>>>

Just a point of reference here. 0.5 or 50% is only six dB in sound levels. Television sound average is twenty dB. So normal television sound would barely appear on the blue waves -- 0.1. Television sound has no trouble with headroom overload or quiet noise and they do it all at 16-bit sampling, not 24-bit or 32-bit floating.

One of the down sides of the more exotic sampling rates is the inability for other programs to deal with the resulting files. There are some music CD authoring programs that have no clue what to do with a 32-bit floating sound file, which is why I'm not convinced 32-floating was a good default for Audacity.

Koz