[John Cole]

Hi all,

I'm just beginning a project to transfer my audio cassettes to digital and have been told that using Audacity is the way forward.

No matter what I do though, I can not get anything like a reliable signal from the stand-alone cassette player (Marantz) into the PC. I'm connecting using an audio cable from the two audio out jacks and then into the mic jack of the laptop. The signal that comes into Audacity is virtually off the scale in terms of the input meter and I don't seem to be able to find any way of regulating it.

The settings I have in Audacity using Windows 7 are as follows:

Recording > Device - Microsoft Sound Mapper - Input
Recording > Channels - 2 (Stereo)

Quality > Default Sample Rate - 22050Hz
Quality > Default Sample Format - 24-bit

The source tape I'm using is a low-gen audience tape and I've tried creating an audio CD from it on a stand-alone (Marantz) burner and the resulting CD sounds great with nowhere near the db count that I get on the Audacity input meter.

I've also tried taking the signal from the stand-alone CD burner and get the same result. I also tried muting the PC speakers in case there is any issue there and it makes no difference.

Is there anything I need to disable to then prevent any other sound corrupting what's coming in to the PC?

Should I be connecting from the tape deck in another way? I only have two output jacks and a headphone jack on the unit.........

Is there a setting in Audacity that limits the db count of the input signal?

Can anyone point me in the right direction? The aim here is literally to just transfer what I have from the source tapes on to the PC and then store it digitally with the aim of eventually putting some of the material on here for all to share.

All help much appreciated.