Thanks for the tip. I was worried someone was going to say it couldn't be done on a budget.. Those look pretty nice from what I was reading on them.
I'd go as far as to say that the sound card isn't where you're going to lose quality. Remembering that it goes down to 8000hz, I think the best thing for recording clean prompts is to use a) a reasonable microphone (I.E. even an SM58 would do), b) record at 24-bit, 44.1 if poss, c) multi-band compress the life out of it and d) record in a quiet environment.
That way you will have some good quality recordings that you can then downsample into gsm/g729/ulaw etc...
Also, don't forget to keep the original recordings before you did anything to them :)
For multiband compression you could use a) isotope ozone, b) T-Racks or c) TC Electronics plug-ins.
If you have all your files recorded and split (believe me splitting is the most time consuming part - I like to split with a few samples spare at each end and then I do a batch process to fade in the first 10 samples and fade out the last 10 samples - this makes sure you don't have clicks when moving from one to the other), then you could send them to me and I will chuck them through a batch process (in Wavelab) for compression, topping and tailing. Bear in mind that if your are going to be compressing, you would need to make sure that there is really no background noise as compression will bring up the noise floor. The normal culprit is the computer fan noise.
Oh by the way I can do the compression et al for free if you want it.
If however you are unable to source a reasonable microphone for a day (you should be able to borrow one from a band or venue) then it would be a bad idea to compress everything.
Anyway let me know if you need any help or have any further questions.
Hope I haven't muddied the waters too much!
-- Cheers,
Matt Riddell _______________________________________________
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