Technical help mp3 etc.

[labyrinth2000ad]

Ok so the situation is that i have recently pulled my entire record collection and beloved 1210's out of storage and they are now ensconsed into there new home in my loft conversion. A few years have passed since the decks have seen any serious action as such and i am now looking at trying to listen to my music in a much more transportable and convenient format. So first i had the idea of getting a cd recorder and recording mixes etc. to take back and forth to weekend home and week day home etc. and listen to in my car, but after speaking to my mate who has just bought a creative labs zen 20 gb mp3 player that i would be far better off with this set up myself, he tells me that it will hold roughly 10,000 tunes which is roughly double my collection, so will leave me space for my cd collection of other music types. I'm a little green on the mp3 technology so my question is this, how easy is it to record analogue mixes to cd and how is it done?
regards and thanks in advance.

[Tim Acid]

hi ya

If you have a lap top or computer ...you can connect your mixer to your soundcard... by using a twin stereo phono to 3.5mm jack..

Then use some free audio recording software to record straight to you HDD..

Save them as mp3 files and then either burn them to discs or download on to a Ipod...

I think an IPOD has a line input - so you maybe able to record straight from your mixer to the ipod... you would need to research that as I am not 100% on that

[AntoH]

It's gonna take a long time mate, your gonna have to record in realtime, and edit clean start and end points also record it as a .wav run it through a limiter then normalise it. Convert to MP3 then, but you do relise mp3 are sh*t quality

I recon your best of useing Soundforge, just output your mixer to the ins on your soundcard as said above. use stereo channel 22,500 sample rate at 16bit

[ilovepiano]

Originally Posted by AntoH

I recon your best of useing Soundforge, just output your mixer to the ins on your soundcard as said above. use stereo channel 22,500 sample rate at 16bit

That will sound wank, use 44.1KHz for your sampling fequency.

[AntoH]

Originally Posted by ilovepiano

That will sound wank, use 44.1KHz for your sampling fequency.

If being saved as a .wav i agree it would, but for the purpose of recording about 5000 tunes 44.1 @ 24bit will take up too much disk space. approx double what 22k would

MP3's sound wank anyway, so the difference would be non noticable

[Mike]

Originally Posted by AntoH

MP3's sound wank anyway, so the difference would be non noticable

The difference between 44khz and 22khz mp3s is VERY noticeable - believe me 22khz mp3 sounds extremely wank! As you've said yourself, it's half the amount of data so the sound will be half as detailed...

[johns_ar]

Originally Posted by AntoH

MP3's sound wank anyway, so the difference would be non noticable

Well they will do if your recording at a shite rate for the wav in the first place

MP3 dont sound wank at all if they are recorded/ripped & encoded properly

[ilovepiano]

Nyquist's theorem states that the sampling rate needs to be double the highest frequency that you want to record. So if you want to record what you can hear (i.e. up to 20KHz) then you need a sampling rate of at least 40Khz.

44.1Khz is the standard sampling rate, I forget the reason for the odd number, but there is a reason why it's 44.1 and not 40.

Recording at 22Khz is ok if the highest frequency you want to record is 11Khz. So you'd get away with using that rate if all you were recording was a bass guitar. Otherwise your recording will sound like it's playing through a 15" speaker with no tweeters.


Interestingly, Harry Nyquist came up with this theory in 1927. Smart guy, considering that digital recordings didn't start till 1957