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I have been using Sound Forge for some years. I have tapes and otherwise analog recordings of audio I record onto my computer as WAV files by plugging the tape player (or otherwise) into the computer's line in jack.

I was attempting to do the same tonight. I hit record and no sound occurs, the meters on the Sound Forge recorder do not "dance". So I check the recording mixer, and it is set to "line in" and an appropriate level. I am hearing sound when I engage "line in" on the playback mixer but it is not registering for recording.

My first thought is, oh crap I fried my soundcard. When I first turned the tape player on, it's volume was rather high (I'm coming out of the headphone jack) and there was a good deal of distortion.

HOWEVER I then tried to record with the little dinky Windows "Sound Recorder" and, guess what, it worked perfectly.

WHY would it record well in Sound Recorder but not in Sound Forge? For the record, when I crank the line in record lvel, and the volume on the tape player, and record in Sound Forge, it records both very faintly, and distorted. Like it's muted somewhere.

Help!

Thanks

Comments

Thomas W. Bethel Mon, 05/29/2006 - 05:24

mt_spiffy

I guess you will need to give us some more information.

Computer, Speed, hard drives, memory, Sound card info etc.

There are too many unknowns. This is similar to what would happen if you called up the local garage and asked for information on gas mileage problems with your car but couldn't tell the garage owner what kind of car, your driving habits, if you were towing a 1000 pounds of junk in your trunk, etc. I think you get the idea.

My first thought is that something has changed on your computer. Maybe the input mixer line level controls are down or you changes some preset in Sound Forge in the preferences with out knowing you did it (maybe with an errant key stroke) Been there done that.

Let us know as much as you can about your setup and I am sure someone will be able to help you.

anonymous Mon, 05/29/2006 - 10:22

Unfortunately that is mostly unknown to me as well. I bought the computer at a swap shop about a year ago, it has a 20 gig hard drive (mostly full) 255? megs of RAM (that's what it says, I thought it only had 128) Windows 98. The sound card is the built in one.

I can only assume it's a problem in Sound Forge though, as I tried recording with Music Match Jukebox and that worked.

anonymous Thu, 06/08/2006 - 04:40

Go into the COntrol Panel and look up system, it will tell you processor speed, memory and then look at the hardware>device manager.

Soundforge needs more RAM and more HD space to run than win sound recorder as it's a more powerful application with more options.

I suggest you a) upgrade your memory to at least 512 MB (pref 1 GB); b) Either backup some files and delete them from the hard drive and/or get a new HD (even an external HD).

Older, less powerful computers cannot handle pro-audio applicationjs very well as they are designed to take advantage of the extra power and speed of the newer computers.

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