im recording thru a usb ext soundcard into audacity. sounds fine going in. all the levels are right, but when i play it back its all distorted and fucked up sounding. running RCAs from sp to sound card. i dont know what im doing wrong.

damn its impossible to get any help on this thing, no tech support, no one in any of the forums have anything to offer. Fuck it

I've never used Audacity before, but on most DAWs you have to set the recording device/interface AND the playback device/interface seperatly... Go into options or preferences or whatever and make sure you have your external USB interface set as the recording and playback device...

thats the first thing i did

all i wanna do is record in stereo. why the fuck cant computers just have L/R inputs, why?

you can get a usb stereo hook up for pretty cheap maybe 20-30 bucks
heres one i use right now
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BVV2IC

What usb soundcard are you using? What kind of comptuer? What OS are you running? What cables are you using to connect the sampler and soundcard?

^
maya44 usb
gateway multi media vista
RCAs

Make sure your soundcard drivers are up to date. After you record are the waveforms you see in Audacity clipped? Is it only Audacity's playback distorting?

maybe your monitor/thru mix (that you hear while you're recording) is at a different level (LOWER) to the actual input/recording in audacity


Also, maybe audacity just sucks ass.. actually that's a known fact.. but it shouldn't be related to your problem

if your on a mac turn your input sound down too. well pc too. that happened to me took me a week lol. and go to the settings of audacity return them all to default.

you are recording too hot ?? watch audacity as you record. you dont want your waves signs to be too big maybe try exporting off your CF card with a cf card reader???

There's an sound setting in OSX where you have to select line-in instead of mic-in (default). The mic-in is very sensitive and not meant to be used for this type of recording.

good luck.