Should I connect the headphones socket of my bass amplifier to the mic port on my PC?

I have limited expertise here, but some audio inputs labeled “mic” are general-purpose line-level inputs (which is what you want) while others actually expect just a microphone. This matters because microphones typically put out lower voltages than headphone outputs, so the microphone input on your PC might over-amplify the headphone signal.

If there’s another audio input next to mic labeled “line in” you should use that. Otherwise try the mic input but start at low levels (if you can adjust the amp output, lower it) and if it sounds distorted rather than “clean” it might not be compatible.

I think the chances of damaging the PC audio section are very small. If you connected the speaker output to the PC—different story!

@gasman has it covered. In short, the voltage of the headphone out and and microphone in on the PC are different, but it will work and won’t break anything. Ideally, you should use the line input on your PC and line output on the amp if both devices have it. A more professional way would be to use an audio interface to connect to your computer to reduce noise and distortion.

And once again, don’t plug the speaker output to your computer!

If you can, use an audio interface. Even running directly in like that will still result in some crackling and distortion (and very little gain, most likely) because the “mic in” in your soundcard just isn’t built to handle those types of frequencies.

If you can, get an audio interface. If you can’t, get familiar with compressors and mastering your audio. It can get pretty bad if you don’t.

@dverhey Mastering and compression won’t do much good if the source is bad to start with. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were @Zyx, but if he decides the quality should be better, an audio interface would be the way to go.

I was thinking more to raise the gain of the audio a bit. I usually find that when recording into the computer like that it’s so quiet you can barely hear anything, resulting in usually adding compression.

But seriously, if this is something you’re going to be doing often, USB audio interfaces are dirt cheap.

Maybe I’m not clear on what an audio interface is. But following @Vortico ‘s link and having seen prices for devices like an m-box leads me to believe the price range is >100. That’s not what I consider dirt cheap.

Yup. In that case, the microphone input works just fine.

If I smoked less grass I’d have enough money to afford anything I wanted, but I’d be too despressed to do anything with it. Thanks for the answers everyone!