Holden wrote:
THe waveform could be better, but it's OK. Even when I'm just
looking at
the levels with no recording, the background is very high. Michael
could be
right, jusnk in junk out. But even when I move far away form the
computer
and have a minimum of crap from everything else, the levesl are still
high.
Doesn't seem to have much of a difference.

By process of elimination, unplug the mic (only).
Did the noise change? If so the noise is coming
in on the mic. If not follow the signal chain on
through to the PC and find where the (biggest)
difference is made.

I was hoping that sound forge had a noise reduction in which I could
make my
recording, record some of the background, and then use the background

recording to filter the noise out of the origianl recording. But I
don't
see anything like that in the program.

You can get a DirectX noise reduction plugin that
will run in Forge, but if you can get the noise
down far enough to begin with you should be able
to use the noise gating from within SF to get some
additional suppression. You should be making every
effort to elimiate the source of the noise.

Next I will try to move as far away from any background as possible
and see
if the baseline is more quiet.

I suspect that this is really where the issue is.
Room treatment and isolation.
Another thing to be aware of is differences in
sampling rates. If you are trying to resample
on-the-fly you may hear some nasty artifacts.
Make sure everything is set the same (ie 44.1)

Holden

good luck
rd