I've hooked up mu tape deck to my sound card to make some copies of old tapes. Output through the headphonesis fine, but audacity records it with a lot of jittery noise. How do I get the input to be clean?

By making your computer faster!

Try using a light window manager (i.e. not Gnome or KDE) for recording. Try something like Fluxbox, IceWM or just TWM.

Make sure that your hard drive has DMA enabled. Searching the forums for information on how to check that and enable it if necessary.

Use a command line recording program like sox or arecord. This will work the best if X isn't running.

http://www.linuxdj.com/audio/quality/

Buy more RAM.

Investigate JACK and the real-time patch that can be applied to the kernel and also other recording software like agnula.

Daniel

Thanks for the exhaustive list. I'm running Gnome on an Athlon 2600+ with 512MB ram and 1G swap. I didn't for a second imagine I might run into memory problems!?!

I'll start with the easies: change to another GUI.

DMA is set

There's a LOT of reading on that link, but siome related searching has brought up something about a low latency kernel at CCRMA (and some stuff about JACK)... I'm looking into it.

Buy a better sound card like the Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1. Creative Labs cards suck for professional recordings. I have no problems recording in KDE, but now I moved to XFCE. I have recorded up to 96 KHz at 24 bit resolution into two channels with out any problems. I use ALSA without Jack.

I'm using an on-board ac97 soundcard 8-(
On my old OS that wasn't a problem at all. I'll have to find a software sollution as I'm not about to invest in a soundcard