Recording external audio source to laptop (or anything)

[edy]

This may seem like a silly question, but I am dumb-founded by the lack of decent external audio inputs on my ASUS laptop and almost any modern laptop I can find in the house. Back in the day, I copied all my tapes and vinyl to digital files on a desktop PC with proper stereo inputs (line-in). Now I have my gear in the basement and occasionally want to transfer stuff over to computer, but I don't want to carry my big desktop downstairs for the task. I was looking for a quick way to record stuff onto my laptop (or any other device you can suggest, for that matter)... yet these things only have those TRRS 4-contact 3.5mm ports with stereo audio output but mono microphone input. What gives? 

Does anyone have a suggestion or idea that may be up to the task? Do I need to go out and buy some kind of digital recorder, or some kind of USB audio capture card? I'm using Linux on my laptop so getting a USB audio capture device that works on Linux may be difficult. Why have they crippled modern laptops so badly that you can't add a tiny line-in jack anymore for stereo input? 

[NiHaoMike]

If you can figure out what audio chip it uses, there's a chance the headphone output can be reconfigured as an input. Look up the program "hdajackretask".

I'm using Linux on my laptop so getting a USB audio capture device that works on Linux may be difficult.

Not difficult at all, USB audio has become pretty standard nowadays.

[edy]

If you can figure out what audio chip it uses, there's a chance the headphone output can be reconfigured as an input. Look up the program "hdajackretask".

Yes thanks, I tried it... apparently it is already part of "alsa-tools-gui" so it's installed on my system already. Looks like I can change around and override some of the ports on the computer.

For now I've managed to find a old HP laptop (probably ~10 years+ or more) which actually had separate stereo headphone and microphone/input jacks. I'm able to record fine on that machine. The problem is I have an old cassette tape that I want to transfer, but every 5 minutes of play the sound starts to get muffled and dull... I open up the deck, and the head is covered in a brownish dust that I have to wipe off. Put the tape back in, plays nicely again... then 5 minutes later, muffled and dull, head covered by same brownish crap. Clean the head and repeat!!! 

So for now I need to keep stopping the tape, wiping the head, playing again and will have to piece back the audio in Audacity later. It's frustrating,  I'm not sure what is happening to this cassette but no matter how many times I play it, more brown dust comes off of it onto the head, ruining the playback sound gradually the longer it is played..... Yet the minute I clean the head, the audio on the tape sounds fine again. It's all there but somehow the top layer of the tape is disintegrating or losing iron oxide!

[james_s]

Many laptops can accept audio in via the headphone jack using one of those plugs that has an extra ring on it. You can also buy USB sound cards for a few dollars though that can do a reasonable job.

[jfiresto]

... Does anyone have a suggestion or idea that may be up to the task? Do I need to go out and buy some kind of digital recorder, or some kind of USB audio capture card? I'm using Linux on my laptop so getting a USB audio capture device that works on Linux may be difficult....

At the moment, I am using an Alesis Multimix 4 compact USB studio mixer to record long term audio in .ogg files on a Raspberry Pi 4:

Code: [Select]

args = """sox -d -q -V0 -C 2 -c 1 -r 22050 --buffer 131072
       """.split() + [get_filename()]

Is that close enough? It was plug and play and has proven quite adaptable.

[greenpossum]

Does anyone have a suggestion or idea that may be up to the task? Do I need to go out and buy some kind of digital recorder, or some kind of USB audio capture card? I'm using Linux on my laptop so getting a USB audio capture device that works on Linux may be difficult. Why have they crippled modern laptops so badly that you can't add a tiny line-in jack anymore for stereo input? 

Just go buy a USB audio dongle for a couple of bucks. If you know the chip used and a search finds a driver, or the vendor says works with Linux then it's most likely supported.

[Whales]

You probably have a TRRS jack, so it's probably possible to make your own TRRS dongle to bring the mic wire out.

I'm with you when it comes to a lack of jacks.  There is more than enough space on almost all laptops for another TRS or TRRS female jack, but they stick with one.  The current trends are to remove and reduce all jacks possible, to the point where many laptops are now coming out with only USB-C for everything.  Dongles are, in my mind, anti-consumer.

10-15 years back the trend was the opposite.  Laptops had crazy amounts of everything.  I hope the manufacturer fashions will swing back the other way some time soon.

EDIT: On USB sound cards

It's worth buying a few different ones.  I've had a cheap USB soundcard that didn't have anti-aliasing filters and an internal laptop sound card that delayed the L and R channels by notably different amounts.  There is a lot more that could be stuffed up, eg too small (under-running) or too large (large delay) audio buffers that may or may not affect you.

[edy]

Thanks for the suggestions. Turns out after I recorded about 45 minutes worth of tape and saved it as a WAV file, there is some drive error near the beginning of the file which is NOT allowing me to:

a) copy it in full
b) edit the full thing in Audacity
c) compress it

Out of a 460 MB file it will only let me read through the first 47 MB !!!!! 

The input/output error (5) is only at that point.... If I use VLC and jump over that mark I can hear the rest of the file ok. How do I copy this file and have it skip over the error? I don't care about the error part, as I can figure out where it is and just copy over that portion of the tape again and splice it in. As it is, I'll be editing the audio because I had to stop it periodically to wipe the iron oxide dust off the head while I kept recording.

I've tried dd, rsync, cp.... nothing seems to let me just copy the entire file. Or is there some way I can "tail" the file and have it just seek (like VLC does) over the bad part (which I know exactly where it is) and just try to copy the remaining file from there?

EDIT:

I just Googled a bit more this morning (after being frustrated last night to no end) and have yet to try this command, maybe it will do the trick:

dd if=/home/file/input.mkv of=/home/output.mkv conv=noerror,sync bs=4M; sync

... and perhaps instead of bs=4M, using the parameter iflag=fullblock. I will have to check on the exact syntax and parameters to use but those seem to be it. The last "sync" after the semicolon seems to be to sync memory cache/disk writes. Not sure if I need it or not. Another example:

dd if=/home/in.mkv of=/home/out.mkv status=progress conv=sync,noerror iflag=fullblock

[Whales]

Woah, that diskerror sounds nasty eDy.  Make sure you have backups of your stuff!

Unable-to-read faults like that smell of hardware (disk) failure.  The ext4 filesystem (default for most linux distros) is journalled and very mature/stable, it pretty much guarantees any software or power failure will never leave you with those symptoms.

N.B. sudo smartctl --all /dev/yourdiskname   (probably /dev/sda)

[edy]

Woah, that diskerror sounds nasty eDy.  Make sure you have backups of your stuff!

Unable-to-read faults like that smell of hardware (disk) failure.  The ext4 filesystem (default for most linux distros) is journalled and very mature/stable, it pretty much guarantees any software or power failure will never leave you with those symptoms.

N.B. sudo smartctl --all /dev/yourdiskname   (probably /dev/sda)

Thanks, I installed smartmontools as it wasn't yet on my system (sudo apt install smartmontools) and currently running it on my drive (sda). EDIT: Passed.

I also tried out the modified "dd" command with the various options I mentioned above and it copied over the file.     Being an uncompressed WAV file there wasn't much of an issue still processing the file in an audio program. All I wanted to do was copy over an old tape to my computer... and instead I got:

a) tape head getting covered in iron oxide dust every 5 minutes ruining audio quality
b) hunting down a 10+ year old laptop just so I could record in stereo input (HP G60-418CA)
c) ending up with a corrupt file and finding a bad sector on a hard drive, yet Smartmontools says it is healthy? 

 

[Whales]

> yet Smartmontools says it is healthy?

No, SMART is very poor (ie useless) at saying a disk is healthy.  Really the only useful thing it can tell you is you are already encountering failure.  More info can be worked out from the individual reported numbers, but that typically requires research into your particular drive model (as they all treat the stats slightly differently).

In scientific terms: SMART has a low false positive rate when saying "disk is dead", but a high false negative rate when saying "disk is not dead", assuming the question is "has disk failed".


Raw formats like WAV are indeed useful at times like this

[alsetalokin4017]

... Does anyone have a suggestion or idea that may be up to the task? Do I need to go out and buy some kind of digital recorder, or some kind of USB audio capture card? I'm using Linux on my laptop so getting a USB audio capture device that works on Linux may be difficult....

At the moment, I am using an Alesis Multimix 4 compact USB studio mixer to record long term audio in .ogg files on a Raspberry Pi 4:

Code: [Select]

args = """sox -d -q -V0 -C 2 -c 1 -r 22050 --buffer 131072
       """.split() + [get_filename()]

Is that close enough? It was plug and play and has proven quite adaptable.

I also am using the Alesis multimix 4 fx/usb with Ubuntu Linux, and also use a Tascam field recorder. Both connect via USB to the Linux audio system automagically, no extra drivers or messing around needed. Both work on a Thinkpad t430 and the desktop. The usb audio is "class compliant" so should be plug-and-play in just about any linux or windows environment. I'm no command-line whiz so I'm glad it works in Audacity, in both Linux and Windwoes 7.

[Messtechniker]

It's all there but somehow the top layer of the tape is disintegrating or losing iron oxide!

Old problem. Carefully bake the tape at an elevated
temperature of around 50 deg C for several hours.
Then you may have the chance of copying in one go once.

For details on this see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky-shed_syndrome

[jfiresto]

... I also am using the Alesis multimix 4 fx/usb with Ubuntu Linux, ... via USB to the Linux audio system automagically.... I'm no command-line whiz so I'm glad it works in Audacity, in both Linux and Windwoes 7.

It also just works with OSX.

[Syntax Error]

I picked up a cheap used Dazzle VHS to DVD converter box on ebay.

The audio only record part works just fine. I can edit and convert to all kinds of formats.

Also, for audio(and video) format conversions, it's worth checking out the FFMPEG utility for Linux.

[edy]

Thanks for all the replies and discussion. I see there are quite a few good options for better sound capture that even work on Linux. I'm going to have to go that route in the future.

For now I have another problem... I can't identify a song on my tape and it's driving me crazy. I uploaded it to some online song identification site (https://www.acrcloud.com) but it is having no luck. I tried to type in the lyrics, can't get any match on Google. It's a 6.2MB MP3 file and I'm happy to share it but I have no idea what this track is.

Are there any other places to post and/or share? I don't want to violate any copyright. I can try uploading it as a video to Google and see if I get flagged as well. It's probably a mid to late 1980's or early 1990's dance funky track with a rhythm that urban slang termed as "Gino beats". Could be some rare mix or mashup even. I'm at a loss to identify it. 

It's not even the tape I'm so excited about, but I'd like to at least find the tracks on some of these old bad quality tapes so I can seek out the artist and buy a good copy. That's why I'm bothering to digitize a handful of crusty cassettes. 

[EDIT:] I've emailed a popular YouTube DJ of that era to see if I can send him my file, he may recognize most of the tracks.