Still remember magnetic tapes? Recently I found one I wanted to digitalize. Luckily my old-school portable Compact Cassette player Philips AQ 6401 works, so I connected it to

Sandberg sound card line-in using 3.5 mm plug. Unfortunately, favourite audio editor Audacity retrieved nothing but silence.

Hooking cassette player to amplifier confirmed all works good, so the problem lays in sound card or software side. Quick searching around brought a post from Ubuntu forums – it turns out line-in is muted by default.

This can be solved quickly by installing graphical Alsa Mixer:

[code lang=”shell”]sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer[/code]

Launch it from start menu: Sound & Video > GNOME ALSA Mixer and uncheck Mute next to Line section:

GNOME ALSA Mixer

After doing that Audacity successfully captured signal comming in.