Help for Audacity on Windows.
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piemel
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by piemel » Mon May 04, 2015 5:39 am
Newbie here and going through a steep learning curve hoping to find some help/advise here. Apologies in advance for not having the proper lingo/terms down.
I am transferring a bunch of old DAT tapes with live music. I have been able to transfer my DAT source to my harddrive using a Behringer UCA202 audio interface. All is going well except that I have unbalanced channels with the Left channel showing clipping.The Right channel looks better, ie no clipping. See attached screen shot
- AudacityChannels.JPG (58.46 KiB) Viewed 770 times
-Q1- Can I just delete the Left channel and replace it with a copy of the Right channel?
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Gale Andrews
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by Gale Andrews » Mon May 04, 2015 5:57 am
Please give your version of Audacity and Windows (see the pink panel at the top of this page).
Yes although it is hardly a good solution you can use the
Audio Track Dropdown Menu to Split Stereo Track then delete the left channel's track. There is Effect >
Clip Fix... which may help with reconstruction of mild distortion.
What output of the DAT are you connecting to?
Does the audio sound mono? If so and you are on Vista or later, please see
How can I record in stereo?.
Gale
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piemel
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by piemel » Mon May 04, 2015 6:10 am
Thanks Gale.
Using Windows 7
Audacity 2.1.0
Audacity settings are set to 2 channel Stereo.
The DAT player is a Sony PCM-R300 connected through RCA Audio L/R to the Beheringer UCA202 input that connects to the laptop via USB. I cant recall the mic I used some 20 years ago but it was the standard mic that came with the Sony portable DAT player D7.
The audio sounds good but I just see the clipping on the left channel. To me it looks like the L channel is a copy of the R channel except that L is 'louder' and shows some clipping.
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Gale Andrews
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by Gale Andrews » Mon May 04, 2015 6:53 am
piemel wrote:Using Windows 7
Audacity 2.1.0
Audacity settings are set to 2 channel Stereo.
The DAT player is a Sony PCM-R300 connected through RCA Audio L/R to the Beheringer UCA202 input that connects to the laptop via USB.
What output of the DAT player are you connecting from? If the DAT player has a headphones output you can control the level of that output (and rebalance it if the player has a balance knob).
piemel wrote:t looks like the L channel is a copy of the R channel except that L is 'louder' and shows some clipping.
Yes it looked like that to me too. So please check in Windows Sound as I suggested to see if you have the Behringer set to mono recording:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/fa ... #rinstereo. Look in the green box in that FAQ. Windows usually sets USB recording devices to mono by default. If you set Audacity to record in stereo and Windows is sending mono then you get one of the channels duplicated in left and right of Audacity.
Gale
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piemel
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by piemel » Mon May 04, 2015 7:15 am
For the DAT output I am not using the headphone but the dedicated RCA L/R outputs.
I'll fiddle around some more with the settings to see if that is the cause of the unbalanced channels
Thanks for the feedback so far.
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Gale Andrews
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by Gale Andrews » Mon May 04, 2015 7:19 am
piemel wrote:For the DAT output I am not using the headphone but the dedicated RCA L/R outputs.
That should be a higher quality output than headphones as a rule, but it could be too "hot" and probably there is no way to control its level or balance.
Gale
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cyrano
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by cyrano » Mon May 04, 2015 2:50 pm
Some DAT recorders have a setting to record the same signal to two channels, with one channel 10 or 20 dB lower.
Could it be that's how you recorded them 20 years ago?
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piemel
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by piemel » Mon May 04, 2015 11:02 pm
I recorded these shows on a Sony D7 portable DAT recorder. The mic I used (cant recall model) was a small one that looked like a little mouse. Very rudimentary.
In some cases I would plug the DAT straight into the soundboard and for those tapes as well I can see that the L channel is louder than the R channel.
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piemel
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by piemel » Wed May 06, 2015 5:51 am
My question is regarding the wave maxing out at a specific constant level (looks like 0.7). Is this because I had a crappy recorder, or because the soundboard was too hot/loud or is it because I have a setting messed up?
- Clipped.JPG (85.92 KiB) Viewed 718 times
Last edited by
Gale Andrews on Wed May 06, 2015 6:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Trimmed and merged back into original topic
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Gale Andrews
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by Gale Andrews » Wed May 06, 2015 6:44 am
We can't see your equipment. Many suggestions have been made what you can do about it. What happens if you reverse left and right into the Behringer?
Gale
