So I'm pretty new to recording--very new to digital recording--and I'm not sure where my problem lies. I was testing out my equipment by recording acoustic guitar and vocals and going through the whole mixing process. I used one Shure SM57 mic to record onto a Fostex MR-8. The tracks sounded great (well, they sounded loud and clean, I won't go into my vocal abilities). Then I dumped the .wavs onto my laptop (Dell Inspiron 5100, 2.4Ghz, 512MB RAM, blah blah blah) and when I tried listening to them I could barely hear them, even with the computer's volume was all the way up. Then I tried loading them into Cool Edit Pro and raising the volume in there. I could get them just about loud enough to hear, but that caused some distortion on the guitar track which wasn't there on the Fostex. I don't know how exactly to describe it, some sort of static sound that happened intrmittently. Like it was raised to a volume level that it shouldn't have been raised to, yet was still fairly quiet.
Also, as a test I dumped .wavs from the MR-8's sample song onto my laptop and had no problems with volume or sound quality. Maybe I'm just not recording loud enough? But I thought I was.
Also, as a test I dumped .wavs from the MR-8's sample song onto my laptop and had no problems with volume or sound quality. Maybe I'm just not recording loud enough? But I thought I was.