Cassette recording now only noise when recording

[Peacefulnip]

I have been using Audacity to copy cassette tapes to my computer. After much fussing and reading all the information I found on recording from cassette to computer at Audacity and other forums, I got it to work. Now I seem to have problems. When I click on record, all that comes through is noise. Even when I have the recording level slider down to ‘1’, it is a square noise signal without highs and lows.

I am using an HP Pavilion dv7-1232nr laptop, dual processor 64-bit running Vista Home premium, Audacity 1.2.6.. Since I do not have a line-in port, I am using the microphone jack hooked to the earphone jack of the cassette player. I have tried using the external microphone recording device as well as the integrated microphone array as the source in my sound device, as well as in Audacity’s settings.

As for drivers, my laptop uses IDT technology and the drivers are Microsoft. Drivers are not available on IDT’s website. I have to go through HP which only offers MS drivers.

Let me stress, it worked for 12 of my tapes before this error occurred. I figured it was a setting that I inadvertently changed so I did a clean uninstall and then reinstalled Audacity. It started to work then the noise happened again.

In addition, I have a couple MP3’s and WAV files I was trying to edit in the program. They load in Audiacity as a short 3 second skretches. No file to edit, just noise.

I am a complete novice when it comes to technical audio stuff but not computers. Any help would be appreciated. TIA

[whomper]

not sure if i am grokking what you really want to say but maybe this will help :

earphone out will be a relatively high level signal
mike in wants a low level
you should be getting a loud signal with all distortion
is that what you call noise?

what happens when you move the slider down close to 0 instead of up to 1?

what happens if you turn down the volume on the cassette player
can you lower the signal enough at the earphone out to get it near the range the mike input would like to see?

reinstalling audacity should not change anything

[Peacefulnip]

Thanks for replying. I don't know what to call it. It does not matter if the volume on the cassette player is all the way down and the recording level is lowered past 1. Actually if the recording level is at 0, the signal flatlines. The signal view is not a flat line, but a flat square with little spikes that go from top to bottom of the viewing area. What comes through the speakers is a loud noise--not white noise that is loud-- but some type line the volume is so loud that it "flattens" I am sure there is some technical term for it. If I lower the volume, the visual just gets thinner without highs and lows. I can try to figure out how to take a screen shot and post it on the forum if that will help. Thanks for the response.

[Irish]

You've got two problems at least.

First, Audacity version 1.2 doesn't work well with Vista. Download the current version, 1.3.12, from here
http://audacityteam.org/download/beta_windows

Secondly,the signal from the cassette player is up to 1000 times bigger than what the microphone input can handle and, even with the volume turned down, there may be enough noise to overload the mic input. In addition, the mic input is mono while the cassette output will be stereo. This puts you in the market for a USB sound card, which will allow you to input a line-level signal from the cassette player into your laptop.
This thread
http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=9477
has reviews of sound cards that work well with Audacity.

PO'L

[Peacefulnip]

Thank you for the reply Irish. I was staying away from the beta version since I am still such a newbie with audio. Last night it worked again, I recorded a tape, then Audacity crashed. Sigh. Looks like I will install 1.3 now. I will look into the sound card. I do have a HDMI jack but I believe it is only an output jack for video stuff. The jack is listed as a device in the HD IDT Audio screen. Hopefully with the beta version the 3 second skretch problem from my WAV recordings (that work fine in Windows Media Player) will be solved.