No Wave Out or Stereo Mix in Audacity stopping you from digitising all those old cassettes and vinyl records?

The solution is relatively simple and only has a small number of steps. This article is written on the basis of using Ubuntu 9.10 and Audacity 1.3.8 to create digital audio backups of all your older formats.

stevey.eu does not encourage or condone illegal activities involving copyrighted materials. This guide is written with the intent of helping people create digital backups of cassettes/records they already own.

Prerequisites

Ubuntu 9.10 (of course!)

Audacity

sudo apt-get install audacity

PulseAudio Volume Control

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

Once you have the above installed, we are good to go after a little setup.

Setting Up

Firstly, we will setup Audacity to use PulseAudio. After opening it, head to preferences via Edit > Preferences (or by hitting CTRL+P). We are looking for the section titled devices, it should be near the top in the left panel.

Here we need to change both devices from the preset of default to “pulse”.

Now, secondly to check everything is in order with PulseAudio we need to head to the Applications menu under Sound & Video open up PulseAudio Volume Control.

On the playback tab you will see a list of anything utilising audio playback currently. I suggest playing something such as a cassette you are planning to record to digital format, to test it is working. Much like the playback tab, the recording tab should show Audacity as we are using this to record whatever audio is being processed by our sound card.

Recording

I suggest here, pressing record in Audacity before playing your input, whether vinyl, cassette or anything else for that matter. You can always trim any extra silence out after recording. I also prefer personally to play the side of the cassette or record in its entirety then split it afterwards, as it is far less time consuming.

Conclusion

I am not going to sit here and write hundreds of words on how to use Audacity to edit your newly recorded backups, but I feel that in a few very short steps we have walked through how to use Audacity to make digital backups.