About a year ago I was trying to record music onto my hard drive from a stereo source. Someone here suggested getting some adaptors to go from two RCA plugs to my computer’s mic input, and capturing with Audacity software. That worked great, except I was only getting the left channel. That suggested to me that the input was mono. Screw it, I said, I need to get a new computer one of these days anyway.
Fast forward to a year later. I got a new computer. So last night I was trying it again, and it seems – though I’m not sure – that I’m getting both left and right channels, but both panned to the middle. It could very well be that I don’t quite understand Audacity well enough, but it could also be that the input jack is mono, or that there’s some setting in Windows that I need to make.
Your mic input will be wildly overloaded by a line level output which will yield crappy, distorted sound regardless of the mono-stereo issue. There are lots of cheap USB mixers for PCs that would be much better solutions for your desired transfer.
Good point about overloading the input, though it seems I only have to turn down the master volume on my mixer to about 5 to stop clipping.
I had no idea there were such things as USB mixers. The cheapest I found was $52 and they go way up from there. Even the cheap ones are way overkill for what I want. Wouldn’t a simple RCA to USB adaptor do that same thing?
Can you vary the balance Left/Right on your source? That should vary your recording in Audacity.
Also, doesn’t Audacity show the sound on the right and left channels as a sort of graph? If so, do the left and right channels differ? If they differ you are recording stereo.
If all else fails a Beatles song like “Getting Better” of Sgt. Pepper’s should have pretty clear stereo separation, guitar on one side and and vocals on the other side.
Since I’m sending from a mixing board, I can absolutely pan things wherever I like. But even having things hard panned, it sounded like they were centered.
As far as Audacity goes, when I start a new recording, it opens a new mono track instead of using the stereo one I specified for it. I’m not sure how to force it to use the one I want yet. But I’m wondering if the new one it opens is mono because that’s what it detects.
I don’t have Audacity here, but according to the manual it should be in Preferences, Audio I/O:
Are you using the Mic input or a Aux or Line-In? I’d use Aux or Line-In. The Mic port could be mono, since it would usually be used for those simple $2 headset mics. But really most everything I’ve seen on PCs since DOS and SoundBlaster days has been stereo.
