Vegas 6 Low Volume and Audacity

[solarblast]

I played the John Williams (guitarist) Scarborough Fair on my CD and recorded it on Audacity. I then put it on the sound track of Vegas. I could it hear it fairly well, but it was orders of magnitude below some sounds from the cam-corder on the track. Mangifiying the graph showed the track to be sparse and the peaks very low. Where did this go wrong? There was some other background accompaniment.

[edDV]

I played the John Williams (guitarist) Scarborough Fair on my CD and recorded it on Audacity. I then put it on the sound track of Vegas. I could it hear it fairly well, but it was orders of magnitude below some sounds from the cam-corder on the track. Mangifiying the graph showed the track to be sparse and the peaks very low. Where did this go wrong? There was some other background accompaniment.

You can adjust the track audio level in Vegas but if the incoming level is too low you will be bringing up the noise floor. Otherwise reprocess levels in Audacity and reimport.

[solarblast]

I should have mentioned that I used winamp to play it. I'm using the vanilla version of audicity (trial?, I think). It's not clear to me what I should beef up. The documentation is light. When I record, I see two tracks (L&R?), and some modest control on the left. Neither seems to have much effect. I'm using stereo mix. I see a volume control on speaker up at the top. It doesn't give much boost to the signal.

If I crank up the volume from Winamp, the graph heigths increase. Same if I crank up the XP Pro volume control in the tray, and the C-Media volume control. Some combo of those should be effective for getting the signal up in Vegas.

Another oddity of Audacity, is that each time I stop it, then start it, it brings up two new tracks. Why not re-use the old ones?

[dLee]

Vegas will extract the audio directly from the CD. Why play and record when you can bring it directly into the project timeline?

When I have a low level recording problem, I have to increase the input source level in my sound card's Control Panel. Sometimes the WinXP Volume control does not match (nor affect) the levels set in the sound card Control Panel. And sometimes it does. Go figure.

[solarblast]

You have a good point. I forgot about that. Still learning. I finally used a combo of event volume leveling and the master control on the mixer. It worked out quite well for my needs.

I'll go back and see what sort of volume I get from going directly from CD.