In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> But getting data from an analog medium into a disk file is generally
> something that takes a lot of wizardry, no matter what the medium
> might be. Most of the answers usually amount to "Pay me a whole lot
> of money, and I'll do it for you, but I won't explain how to do it in
> language that you can understand."
It all depends on what you want. If you have an analog recording that
is basically all noise, crackles and pops with some music which is
sometimes audible in the background, and you want to convert that to a
CD suitable for fooling people into believing that behind the curtain
there is actually a human playing the music rather than a set of
speakers, then some kind of incomprehensible wizardry will surely be
called for.
However, I have had reasonable results recording various LPs and tapes
to CD, for the purposes of teaching country dancing -- if the CDs are
played through a boom box in a gymnasium, and the audience is busy
dancing, the quality requirements are a little less stringent than if
you invite your fellow audiophiles over so they can gape at your
wonderful collection of self-recorded CDs.
My setup is the following: I have a fairly decent sound card in my
computer (a Soundblaster AWE64 Value, if you must know -- these can
probably be picked up cheaply these days, and their A/D converter
isn't really bad at all). I run a cable from the �tape recording out�
jacks of my stereo to the sound card's �line in� jack. This cable has
two RCA plugs at one end and a Walkman-type stereo micro-jack at the
other end; these cables should be readily available at your friendly
neighborhood Radio Shack etc. Having done that, I'm basically all
ready to record tapes or LPs into my computer. One point to note is
that the cable in question will, to a certain extent, work as an
antenna for the ambient RF �noise�, as such cables do, so the longer
and/or cheaper your cable is, the more noisy your music will sound
after it has passed through it.
The only thing that is missing now is a suitable program which will
capture stuff from the sound card and write it to a file on disk. Some
of the programs that people use on Windows would be CoolEdit or
SoundForge, which can do a lot more than just record sound to disk; on
Linux, which is the O/S I'm using, I have a program called Broadcast
which works well for me (there are others). If you intend to record a
complete side of a LP or tape in one go, which is what you will want
to do, make sure that you use a program that will actually write to
disk while it is recording rather than attempt to gobble everything to
RAM and write it to disk after the recording is finished -- a minute
of sound takes about 10 megabytes as a CD-quality sound file, so go
figure.
These programs will usually have some kind of �meter� that you can use
to set up the volume of the stereo (using the appropriate knob) and/or
the input sensitivity of your sound card (using a �sound mixer� type
program). Proceed like you would if you were recording to a tape, with
the following caveats:
1. Make sure *not* to overdrive the sound card input. On a tape, if
this happens occasionally it's not a problem, but if the input
signal to a D/A converter exceeds the maximum that can be expressed
in digital code, the result will sound terrible.
2. As usual it is best to turn the input signal up fairly loudly; if
your analog signal is very quiet then the inevitable noise will
in comparison be more noticeable.
Some sound cards (like the AWE64) have �treble� and �bass� controls
that will influence the signal recorded. For the AWE64, people tell me
that it is advisable to put the treble at �60%� and the bass at �40%�,
and that seems to give reasonable results for me, but it is probably
best to experiment. (Actually, since recently I'm running all my
keyboards, computer, stereo etc. through a Behringer mixer for
convenience, and I usually use its equalizing facilities to tweak the
sound if necessary.)
Once you have recorded an LP (or half of one, as it were), here's your
chance to actually try and improve the sound using one of the programs
that exist for the purpose. You can either buy one of the commercially
available packages, which are usually faster, more versatile and/or
work better, or try to find a shareware package, of which there are
also some around. I use a Linux program called �gramofile� which
offers some facilities to remove pops or crackling noises, but I find
that for the purposes of using the resulting CDs for dance classes,
such noises don't really matter a lot -- so I generally don't bother.
(It also helps to give the LPs in question a thorough cleaning before
recording them.)
It would in principle be possible to write the half-LP to a CD at this
point, but what one wants is the ability to jump to the beginning of
each track et cetera. So you need to �split� the big sound file into
bits corresponding to the individual tracks; there is of course
software which will do this for you by looking for moments of silence
(The �gramofile� package for Linux will do that as well). If this
doesn't work -- possibly because the material in question is a live
recording with no pauses between pieces -- you may have to insert the
track beginnings yourself. (I've never actually done this so you will
have to figure this out on your own, depending on the software you're
using. CD-burning software, I'm told, will sometimes let you do this.)
This is approximately what I do, and I'm generally happy with the
results. From the point of view of a country dance teacher and
musician, the ability to process sound files on the computer is quite
invaluable, since in addition to copying old tapes and LPs to CD for
practical purposes, it is also possible to cut bits out of the middle
of a 8x32 bar reel to make a 3x32 bar reel suitable for a
demonstration, or to play tunes at half speed (one octave lower) to
figure out more easily exactly how they go.
Anselm
--
Anselm Lingnau ......................... [EMAIL PROTECTED]
May your life be like toilet paper -- long and useful. -- Robert E. Irie
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