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I recently purchased a cable to connect my digital roland piano to my computer.  

After connecting the jacks to my pianos outputs and the other side to the blue port of the back of my computer (I believe this is the line in to the soundcard), I'm stuck on what to do next.
If anyone could advise me on what to do to start recording audio to my computer, I would be forever in your debt.

Thankyou so much.

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Comments

Jakers Mon, 10/24/2011 - 04:34

There's 2 blue ports on the back of my computer.. one doesn't pick up anything when I plug the cable into it, the other notifies me that a device has been plugged in, and messes up my speakers A LOT. I'm getting a lot of distortion from my speakers when I play music. The sound options say 'line-in ready'.

TheJackAttack Mon, 10/24/2011 - 11:15

Audacity is a pseudo DAW-like single track recorder. How does this address the hardware issues? It doesn't. Cakewalk is perfectly adequate for his needs and if it isn't, then Audacity isn't going to help him. Reaper would be the next step for a DAW.

Back to the real issue, hardware. Can it be cobbled with the current equipment? Yes.

There are a myriad of issues though. #1) on most cheap inbuilt sound cards the jack also doubles as a jack. In cards where there is is both one or the other still usually doubles as something else. Make sure that the input is designated correctly as within both the Windows sound manager and the Soundblaster(?) or RealtekHD(?) GUI.

#2) Make sure the signal coming out of the Roland is not too hot.

#3) Make sure that your output is set within the DAW control panel (presumably Cakewalk). Just because you managed to set the input assigments to the line input jack doesn't mean the outputs of the virtual main fader are set automatically to the native soundcard. These settings are usually accessed via a area with the program itself as well as sometimes from the actual sound driver. I'm still not certain there is a specific ASIO driver for the as yet unnamed sound chip but even so, the settings might also need adjustment from the Windows sound manager.

#4) Make sure the inbuilt audio chip is set to the same bit rate/sample rate as your project within Cakewalk. This means 16 bit/44,1000 usually is the default on sound chips and to get audio back out to the speakers the DAW program must feed the sound chip that same rate of data.

TheJackAttack Mon, 10/24/2011 - 11:36

Oh and a last thing I just though about:
When recording generally the audio pass through is turned off. Most programs have a setting to turn on monitoring while recording but these generally default to off so as to reduce the load on the computer's CPU. There doesn't seem to be a standard location for this setting either. When Audition changed to CS5.5 they also changed the layout of this setting and it took me a while to find it. Why it changed from the way it had been ever since Cool Edit Pro I can't fathom but change it did. Reaper has the button available both in the mix window as well as the waveform window for example.

Anyway, this will be the problem if it is only that you can't hear audio while recording but hear plenty during playback.