[geeks] Audio Recording

[nate at portents.com]

I have a similar to-do with some old analog tapes, but I haven't gotten to
it yet... I have a semi-pro USB interface I plan to use for audio
digitizing, and was thinking of just using Audacity for my first go:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Lossless codecs would be oldies like WAVE and AIFF, or new ones like FLAC
and Apple Lossless (which have lossless compression to save space and not
sacrifice quality), obviously preferable to all the audio formats that use
psychoacoustic compression to remove portions of sound that a mathematical
model tries to predict the human hearing system won't notice.

I don't remember off the top of my head which USB audio interface I
bought, but glancing around in the $80 category there are things like the
TASCAM US-100, Lexicon Alpha, Cakewalk UA-1G, that should do what you need
and with better quality than on-board audio in most cases.

The SGI hardware should be quality though, I just have no experience to
offer with it.

- Nate

On Mon, 24 Jan 2011 11:28:19 -0800, "Sheldon T. Hall" <shel at artell.net>
wrote:
> Folks-
> 
> I have a large box of old analog tape recordings I'd like to transfer to
a
> digital medium.  I have appropriate tape players, but I could use some
> advice on the digital end.
> 
> In particular, I'd like some opinions (and other braindumps) on the
> hardware/OS/application end of things.  I'd like to produce either
> non-compressed files (WAV or similar) or very-high-quality compressed
ones
> (MP3 or equivalent.)  Many of the tapes are amateur recordings of live
> performances, so additional quality degradation would be undesirable. 
All
> the tapes are pretty fragile, so I'd like to minimize the number of
> head-passes required.
> 
> I have done digital recordings from LP records and analog tapes before,
so
> I
> know, generally, how to do it.  I just want to do it as well as possible
on
> the first go, because the volume of material would seem to exclude more
> than
> one attempt.
> 
> At hand, I have a number of computers, though nothing especially
configured
> for this task.  Among them are ...
> 
> Various PC laptops running Windows XP.  None of these have hardware
> "line-in" connections, though my main laptop gives one the option of
making
> the microphone jack a "line-in" connection through software.  The only
> recording software I have is the default Windows "sound recorder", which
is
> clearly inadequate.
> 
> Various PC desktops running recent Ubuntu Linux.  None of these machines
> are
> in any sort of "production" so I could certainly install a specific
Linux
> distribution for this purpose.  All have audio hardware whose quality is
> unknown.
> 
> Various SGI desktops, including an O2 with A/V module and an Octane. 
Both
> have Irix and the default sound recording and manipulation applications.
> 
> Pointers, warstories, and anatomically-posible suggestions solicited.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> -Shel
> _______________________________________________
> GEEKS:  http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks