Are you using the onboard sound on your motherboard???

If so buy a soundcard… doesn’t even need to be an expensive one.. creative do a soundblaster audigy one for £16 OEM on ebuyer.com and that would do the trick…

Onboard sound is only ever good enough for play back it doesn’t encode the wave properly from analogue to digital..

with laptops there are two problems

1. the signal is way to loud (100 times or so) from a line in to a microphone input. It will be distorted

2. the electronics is by necessity all crammed close togehter, and computers create a lot of unwanted electronic signals. These find their way into your analogue audio signal and put noise onto it.

there are lots of “soundcards” what operate through the USB input, with decent line in connections and a good distance from the noisy computer.

I’ve seen some around £50 or so but I tend to only deal with basic audio for business (i.e presentations/phone calls) these days rather than music.

There are plenty of musicians on here who may have suggestions of a decent one (although I suspect it could well be around £100 or more). Even a £50 one will be better than the old tape cassettes what most of us used to use “back in the day” :laugh_at:

As far as recording through a laptop, I’d say forget about it…better to find a buddy with some recording equipment – doesn’t matter how basic – take him or her a sixxer and a satchel of whatever and start recording. There’s always someone around with soundforge and an hour to kill.