Newbie in need of help

[joethall]

I am trying to recover to CD some vintage reel-to-reel and cassette tape music programs. I have a working reel-to-reel tape deck and a Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop running Vista Home Premium.

I have played around just a little bit with Audacity but have found it kind of hard to use.

I have the loan of an ADS RDX-150 audio converter that, supposedly, takes in my R/L stereo audio and digitizes it to a USB port. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get Audacity to recognize input from that USB port.

I am open to other approaches and I'm hoping that folks on this forum can give me some good ideas. I just want to get CD's made of these materials before I am no longer able to play them.

Thanks

jth

[thesilentdrummer]

Hmm, maybe if you go to edit and click on preferences, then check the upper right hand corner of that window to make sure your USB device is selected, that might do the trick. See attached.

[joethall]

We may not be using the same versions of Audacity. Mine says it is 1.2.6 but I get the Preferences as shown in the attachement. There are three choices in the drop-down: 1) Microsoft Sound Mapper - input,
2) Microphone / Line In (SigmaTel and
3) Microphone (Logitech microphone

I've been using 2) as it is the only one that mentions "Line In". The recorder goes through a mixer so that I can mess with the levels and then directly into the "Mic/Line-In" jack on the Dell Insprion E1705 Vista laptop.

What I get is massive distortion.

[thesilentdrummer]

Originally Posted by joethall

We may not be using the same versions of Audacity.

Oops. I forgot I am using the beta version of Audacity.

Regardless, I can work with what you gave me. Is Sigma Tel the manufacturer of your USB thing??

Now that I looked at audacity again, I remembered there is a little drop down menu in the top section near the play/record/etc. area of the main screen. Drop that down and see if your USB device is shown there.