ozpeter

Apart from the possibility of people making money out of their performances without giving them a cut - which is of course not necessarily the case when someone makes a 'stealth' recording, I realise that much of this is a 'for personal pleasure only' pursuit - the musicians I know (largely classical) are very concerned about performances which they were not happy with being perpetuated, and/or subjected to the closer examination which recording enables. Often I've come home with a legitimate recording of what seemed like a great performance, but when I start going over it for editing etc you start to hear the flaws with repeated playing. The best performances for me are always the ones that weren't recorded! Because of digital editing people expect to hear technically perfect performances on recordings, and when they hear they are not in real-life live recordings, they can think less of a perfectly good performer. I think also that there have historically been abuses of trust which make musicians as a breed wary of the recording process. A recording is made for a certain purpose, someone gives a copy to someone else on the side, they make a couple of copies for their mates, and then who knows where it ends up - even if it's only the blank CD manufacturers who are making money from it. There's also the whole aspect of the composers of the music - performance rights and recording rights are often two different things in respect of which separate payments are due - it's easy to forget that aspect (and in some instances where bands do allow their performances of others' music to be recorded, they are possibly overlooking that matter). All issues to be aware of - which is why Mr Volta started this thread in the first place, all credit to him!

Good to see you thinking along those lines. Personally, as one who works in the area of recording live performances having obtained legal releases first to record and then to broadcast the material, and knowing how sensitive the musicians I work with are to these issues, I find it hard to morally distinguish between "stealth recording" of performances clearly not intended to be recorded, and using cracked software - the former goes without comment here while the latter is, quite rightly, strongly disapproved of. I realise that this is a personal view which probably does not accord with the majority view here - and my comment isn't aimed at anyone in particular - I'm not saying that anyone who does stealth recording also uses illegal software - I'm just putting out the thought that the two issues are connected, for either private reflection or for constructive and considered discussion.

Good tip re re-encoding, Fishstyk - thanks!

Sometimes CD extraction can slow down considerably if errors are encountered.

In fact the correct limit for a wave file is 4gb - the chunk sizes in RIFF are defined as unsigned 32-bit integers, but many RIFF handling programs (such as SonicStage sadly) considers them as signed, hence the 2GB limit instead of 4GB. FWIW. Total Recorder or Audition will handle 4Gb for instance.

Try Googling for the Yamaha MD8 for further hints and tips - I think it was more popular and it's very much the same apart from the number of tracks. Given how obsolete they are, I'd not expect to pay much for one. Neat machines, though - I can't quite part with my MD8 even though I have no real use for it.

I've just gone a little mad and added a Sound Devices HX-3 headphone amp to my kit. See http://www.sounddevices.com/products/hx3master.htm for details. Admittedly inproving the output of my NH900 when recording on location was but one of the motives in making the purchase, but it sure is the ultimate in that respect. Good points:- - Huge output, makes even a minidisc headphone output perfectly usable under noisy conditions. If using it with balanced outputs from other kit, it's even better. - No noise at any bearable level - The feeling that what you are hearing is what you've got. - Runs from a pair of AA batteries for about ten hours on location - no need to take yet another wall wart. - Supplied connector enables distribution of other devices' headphone outputs whether 1/8 or 1/4" - Pass-through socket allows one to tap headphones into a line and then pass it to another (unbalanced) input. - Mono/stereo switch is dead handy for checking mono compatibility and informing balance decisions. - You can invite a couple of friends to bring their cans along and be amazed too! The outputs are not fazed by having very different headphone types connected. Bad points:- - Not cheap! But build quality makes you feel it will outlive you. Well, me anyway. - Pity there's no switching for two input devices, but that would be simple to provide externally.

I've in effect replaced my HHB PortaDat - one of the more expensive DAT recorders you could buy - with a Hi-MD recorder. Obviously it depends exactly what you need, but tonight for instance I was doing a classical recording session direct to computer using a Motu Traveler and used the Hi-MD recorder fed from the optical output of the Traveler as an always-running backup. In Hi-SP it would happily record a day's sessions onto one disc. With DAT I'd have to keep an eye on the time remaining clock.

See http://www.d-mpro.com/users/folder.asp?Fol...39&Tab=Overview - it records mp3 or wave to 20gb drive, then downloads to Pc or you can edit and then burn to the built-in CD drive. Cool, huh? But rather larger than an MD recorder. Great for concerts as long as stealth isn't required. Price seems to be about $1100 US.

In this day and age, the kind of facility you have in mind shouldn't be too hard to add, surely? And might be handy for tapers working in the dark in concert halls! In addition to your concerns, I have to say that someone in my family who has little use of her hands would find Sony's tiny buttons quite impossible. Even those with good manipulative skills find them hard!

Hmm... am I the first person to lose a file to SS3.2?? I recorded two short test files through optical in - the first one in wave format, the second in Hi-SP. I didn't play back the first one or particularly notice whether it was there on the MD display, but when I connected the recorder to SS3.2, the first one certainly wasn't there then. There could be other explanations as I didn't verify what the state of things was before connecting the recorder to the computer, but I'm just flagging this up in case anyone else comes across anything similar. (And yes, DRM does still apply to optical recordings - Marc, here I come).

If you are making live recordings and you want the digital rights management removed, upgrading to v3.2 (currently being released) is essential.

Ooo, it really works - just uploaded a track, deleted it from the PC, and uploaded it again! I feel kinda emotional - would someone pass a hanky? You still can't write-protect the disc before uploading, however, which remains not ideal...

Something worth trying - invert the encoded file against the original file in Audition's multitrack view - if they are identical, then you'll hear silence of course, but obviously lossy compression will never achieve that by definition. What you then hear is the character of the difference between the files, including artifacts. Perhaps look at the spectral view of that difference in respect of different bitrates. Personally I have never found it very hard to line up the two recordings exactly in time, which is of course essential. Spectral view can also sometimes directly show what's going on with lossy compression - I recall seeing the spectral view of an mp3 file of parrots calling, and at some points you could see actual holes in the audio, where the compression had effectively dumped some frequencies altogether in an attempt to reproduce others it ranked as more important.

What about the restrictions on recordings made via optical input? Any improvement there?

Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit) is often used for such purposes. Its frequency analyser has four "hold" buttons for making comparisons. But there are freeware VST analysers Out There which could be used with a suitable host (VSThost, Synthedit, Kristal, etc).

Good grief! I don't think I would go quite that far for a 'point' release! But good luck anyway...

I think Wavpack even supports 32-bit float.

See here for an alternative approach I reported some time back - which continues to work very well indeed.

Could be something to do with my observations in http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showt...indpost&p=57836 - or not... but essentially, Hi-SP transfers can suffer from problems at the location of auto-trackmarks, according to my tests.

"The maximum possible size of a WAV file is 4GB. (The limit is due to the fact that the header of a WAV file contains a field giving the length of the file in bytes. This field is an unsigned 32-bit integer)." "Some audio programs get this wrong, and interpret the file length as a signed number, thus imposing a 2GB limit." [Easier to quote these bits from the net than to give urls]

S'ok, I'll get over it. With close connections there I'll admit to being a walking advert, but at the same time with all of these things, it's horses for courses and so forth. In the case of the Wavpack/Audition connection, it's nothing to do with Adobe, it's simply a filter that downloads with the main Wavpack program and can simply be copied into the Audition program directory. So the Flac people could do the same if they wanted - or may even have done so, I simply don't know. Update - http://www.vuplayer.com/other.htm has one. Good old Google. Now we've both learned something!

That's my reason for using WavPack, coupled with its completely transparent operation in Audition / Cool Edit. You simply choose WavPack instead of PCM when saving, and when you open your Audition project, the WavPack files are automatically (and rapidy) decoded without user information. Of course it's quite possible FLAC does that too. VUplayer plays WavPack files FWIW - doubtless others - very neat player, that.

Heh, that reminds me of the early days of digital recording using a Sony F1 system which recorded digits to Betamax tape. Then you took the result to a dedicated digital editing facility to have it prepared for CD. I remember back in '84 going to HHB's HQ (then a converted garage in North London) to edit a double classical CD there at huge expense. First thing I did was ask where I could plug in my headphones. "That's funny," said the house engineer, "that's the first thing Eric Clapton said when he was in editing his new CD last week". "Eric Clapton sat in this very chair??!!" I asked in awe. "Heh", laughed the engineer - "Eric Clapton nearly shat in that chair when we told him the bill he'd run up. But I'm off topic again. Favourite gadget - Palm Tungsten E. There seems to be nothing it can't do.

Personally I use WavPack.