I am running Fedora Core 4.

I have a Sound Card which I want to use for recording.

I feed a "line signal" in to the Line-in on the card.

I use Volume Control (Alsa Mixer) to adjust the level of the incoming signal.

I set the input level to Maximum and record.

I look at the recorded signal with Audacity. The wave form 'envelope' looks feeble.

If I am recording at 16 bits, I would expect that what Audacity shows as +1 at the top, 0 in the middle and -1 at the bottom is really 'levels of sound' between + and - 32768. A loud noise would go all the way to +32768 and a quieter sound to a lower level. I burn the recording to a CD and some CD players are not so good as others at amplifying a 'quiet' signal. What I get is a signal which goes (say) from -10000 to +10000. I have found that I can get Audacity to amplify this signal (post recording) - and thereby I get a recording on CD which is acceptable - but it seems to me that by so doing, I am losing out on some of the quality I should be able to get.

I thought perhaps the Sound Card I had (fairly 'budget') was maybe not able to take a 'reasonable' signal and make a decent recording of it - so I bought another (again, not expensive) card but the effect is the same.

I don't think that two different cards from different manufacturers would show the same fault (or rather, I think that if it was a fault, I would be very surprised to have the same fault) - so I have to come back to the idea that I have something wrong in my configuration - something which I might adjust.

I would appreciate any pointers as the where I might look to get a better recording level.

TIA

Ian

I've noticed that some cards have little, if any, adjustment available on the line in. If there is any hope, it's by adjusting the Capture vilome on alsamixer, not in Audacity. Turning up the volume on the .wav file after it's completed seems to work very well, tho