Setting Volume For Recording Program
For this section I will use the free recording program
Kristal Audio Engine, but the concepts will apply to any recording program. I will only use Kristal to illustrate the basic concepts, as each recording program will be a little different.
First, in your recording program arm a track for recording and then choose the input that you are plugged into on your soundcard. In my case I am using only the "left side" of the line input. The line input is selected in my mixer and therefore the
analog in shown in the pic below represents the
line input.
When you play your instrument you should be able to see the input meter moving for the track you are about to record on. In the picture below, my volume is set to high and the meter indicates the signal is clipping. This is what we are trying to avoid so we'll need to fix this.
To fix the clipping problem, open up the Windows mixer on top of your recording program and go to the
Recording Mixer (as illustrated above).
With the mixer on top of your recording program, you can make volume adjustments to the input that you are using on your soundcard (in my case, I'm using the line input) while playing your instrument and watching the input meter in your recording program. It is important to make sure that you play the
loudest section of your song so you can be sure you will not clip at any point in your recording. Try to give yourself at least 3dB of headroom just in case you get some wild peaks. It's a little hard to judge in Kristal since there is no dB scale for the input meters, so just eye-ball the meters and give yourself plenty of room. The meters in the image above look alright and that's the highest peak I get while playing my loudest.
NOTE: Another thing to make sure of if you are using a mixer, or a preamp, etc. is even if you are not peaking in your recording program, you still want to make sure that you are not driving the soundcard's input to hot from your mixer or other equipment. You can clip at the input of your soundcard and then compensate for this by turning the volume down low enough in the Windows mixer so that your recording program's meters won't indicate any clipping. However, this won't fix the clipping at the soundcard's input. So make sure you are not sending to hot of a signal into your soundcard.