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Can a laptop record through the mic jack?

Articles, Q&A - by - November 8, 2010 - 09:42 Etc/GMT+5 - Be first to Comment!

I have a lot of cassettes I want to copy to CD. I’ve been using my cassette deck into the stereo system into an old desktop running Audacity because it has a line in jack. Unfortunately, the wife does not think the desktop adds to the decor of the living room.

Can a laptop record through the mic jack? Thanks.

The Mic in jack on laptops is usually lower quality / higher noise (for line level signals because of the higher gain), and often the mic jacks are not even stereo input…. some laptops can select the jack to be line or mic in (such as some Mac Book Pros and other higher end laptops) -these might work fine. You might check and see if your laptop has that option in the audio properties.

You tend to get better results using an external usb or firewire audio device, and one that is “good enough” for cassettes are fairly inexpensive ($30 ish) and a quick trip to the local computer superstore is worth the time.

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