Digital Bits Technology Column QnA

Question: 

Thanks for your directions on converting cassettes to digital files using Audacity.

Many of my cassettes worked just fine, but some of them selectively dropped audio parts (it sounded like I had removed the vocals for a few minutes). The strange thing was that it left one part of the duet, and the instrumentals. I tried re-recording, and still had the same problem.

Any idea how this happened and how to fix it?

Answer:

You’re saying the Audacity-recorded version was missing some of your audio, like vocals? That sounds to me like you may be recording with a single-channel in Audacity, when you need to be recording in stereo. It may be that only one channel is getting recorded, and the other is getting dropped.

If this is the case, you need to make sure your Audacity settings are set to record in stereo. You also need to make sure that your cable (running from player to PC) is also a stereo cable, and not mono.

Other articles related to this topic:

• Stereo Audacity recording keeps appearing as mono
• Stereo recording problems with Audacity
• Audacity doesn’t record when it worked correctly before
• Echo when recording cassette in Audacity
• Noise Reduction in Audacity