Problem Getting Right Volume For Computer Music To Tape

[Harry]

I'm trying to copy music from my PC to a cassette tape recorder. I'm using a wire plug from my PC speakers port to my tape recorders microphone port to record the music from my PC. Finding the right volume setting this way for the tape is extremely difficult. A normal comfortable speaker volume copied to tape comes out super loud and scratchy. I have set the music on the computer to super low volume in order for the music to come out right but I don't think it's perfect. It still sounds a little airy like maybe now the volume isn't quite high enough. How do you find the right volume setting for the computer when recording to tape other than just by trial and error. Is there any program or any way I can set the volume up right to copy music from a PC to tape.

[bailey]

that is a very poor way to connect it and will cause many problems.
what you need to do it connect from the sound card line out jact to the line in jack on the recorder.

[Harry]

Thank you but my computer has no line out jack that I can see. Only two speaker jacks and a record jack. Also, my cassette recorder has no line in jack that I can see. It only has a microphone, remote, and monitor jack. I just used a headphone on the monitor jack to hear the cassette as I recorded so I was able to adjust the sound a little better as before I couldn't hear anything when I recorded. Now it has come out tolerable but does not sound like the wave file I had from the computer and I know when taping songs off the radio that I can get much better sound quality than that on tape. Maybe there's a recording out setting that needs to be set to a highter quality but if the sound comes out fine on the speakers than I don't see why it shouldn't come out the same on tape.

[SonicVanguard]

You're biggest problem is using the speaker output on your computer. It's just driving the signal too loud - and there's little you can do about that considering you're inputting to the microphone input. You may have already blown the microphone input's preamp doing this. That input is just not designed for higher power signals - especiallly speaker level signals.

Without getting to complicated, the problem your running into is called gain-staging. The idea is with gain-staging is to have consistant gain settings (gain is relative to volume, but different) throught your signal path. So for example, using the signal path bailey suggested, you would have a 0dB signal coming from your line-output on the soundcard to a pre-amp expecting a 0dB signal at the tape deck. But your signal path is more like speaker-level output (around +10dB) to a microphone pre-amp (expecting a -10dB input). That's why you're having so much difficulty. The way you've got this setup, you can't establish constant gain-staging. So even whe you can get things "a little better", the output from the speaker-line out is so low there isn't enough headroom for the signal to sound good.

Dave.

[Harry]

Thanks for that input. I am wondering about something that I'm going to try later. Winamp has something called an equalizer which allows you to set the decibels to minus levels. Maybe that will work.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that two months ago I went the opposite way from tape to computer and it worked perfectly. But now I can't even remember exactly how I did it though I believe I just used the monitor jack of the tape deck to the microphone jack of the PC.

Actually, I remember now that it wasn't perfect but came out with a lot of background noise but I then used a program called Ray Gun by Aboretum on it to clean it up and after resampling to 44mhz 16 bit, the music came out sounding significantly better than the tape. I was very amazed with that one.