Minimise sound quality loss uploading to PC

[Guest Anonymous]

I bought a Sony Mz-N710 minidisc recorder and a good sony stereo microphone ECM-MS907

I have a PC running Microsoft Millenium, with a CD burner and Nero burning software, and a sound card with a line in jack.

After reading the manual I discovered I can’t upload microphone recorded tracks onto the PC using the USB cable.

So I hear the only way to get these tracks onto my pc is to use my line-in on my PC sound card, and my head-phone jack from the minidisk.

I have a few questions concerning this transfer

· Will the quality of the sound recorded on the minidisk deteriorate significantly during the transfer over to the PC?

· What factors can I change to improve the quality of the sound stored in the wav files on my PC. (For example the type of recording software on the PC, the type of sound card, the type of cable used, any particular settings on the PC)

· Any good software required to record the sound as it enters into the PC input line ? Please see functionality required below.

· Will track marks be lost ?

Functionality I am looking for

I want to record voice. To record live reading of poems. But I would like a real live recording ‘feel’ from the finished CD. And to build a library of these tracks on my PC.

Functions desired of system:

· To able to record in stereo

· To maintain as high a sound quality as possible

· To build libraries of ‘tracks’ which can be identified by key search words so that they can be found easily later on

· Ability to easily select a number of tracks and then burn them to a CD

· Ability to cut track easily at a later date (either cut off start, or end or bit out of middle)

· Able to overlay tracks together ? (for example on the background of the voice reading the poem, to overlay the sound of bird song)

· To build some sort of virtual selections of these tracks. Identify 10 or 20 tracks, give them a label. And then use this label by a CD burner program (or functionality within this ‘recorder program’) to write that selection of tracks to a CD. Ideally only 1 physical copy of each track on the PC, even if the same track is part of many virtual groups. So that if one were to record this track, the wave file is easily replaced, and that version of the track will be written to the CD burner.

Optical cable

I read one note which states that If you get an MD deck with optical output (Sony MDS-JE780, JB980 etc)you can record your MDs digitally onto CDR/W, as long as you have the right connections on your PC or CD recorder. All in realtime, at the moment there's no upload facility in the MD world...

Would the quality of this method of transferring the date greatly improve the quality?

Thanks you for any advice you can give.

Dave

[sudden]

Question 1, 2 & 3: No, quality will still be high. Use high-end cables. The better sound card will probobly result in better sound but I doubt that a fellow mortal man will ever hear the differens. Any sound recorder software will do the trick, you most likly have one on your PC (Start MenuProgramsAccessoriesEntertainmentSound Recorder), adjust rec level in volume control center (line in) and set to CD quality (16 bit / 44.100mhz Stereo). Start recording. You must name the .wav files one by one as you record, can also record a bigg one then cut it down to seperat tracks. For that you need a sound editor, I use GoldWave and are very happy with it. Note that waves in that quality are 10mb per minute, try not to make files that are larger than your ram memory. With a sound editor you can enhance the quality alot, maximize sound level, EQ adjust and so on.

Question 4: Yes, track marks from md will be lost.

When you have transferd the tracks you want and edit them you'll end up with a bunch of large wave files. I would recomend you to convert them into mp3 files (192kbit) for easyer handle and storing. Build your folders/library like you want em, make audio CD's. For realy precious tracks I save the MD master discs.

About the optical cable, what you gain is two D/A A/D conversions. Again I don't think it would make any audio differens, atleast not so much that it's worth the extra equipment needed.

There are ways to record direct to mp3 files from MD but if you want to edit them you still must convert to wave.

mp3 encoder

http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/

wave editor

http://www.goldwave.com/

[Guest Anonymous]

AIPL Singulator is good for the recording step. You can just set it up and leave it to do its thing while the NetMD plays.

As far as sound quality goes... the soundcard CAN hurt the sound quality, but it'll only be noticeable if it's a cheap onboard soundchip sort of deal, or a crappy or old 16-bit card.

Like with my SoundBlaster 128 I only have a little bass drop problem, which I solve by applying some EQ with GoldWave.

[Daijoubu]

I would sugest you to record at lower volume and normalise afterward to prevent clipping

Also record few secs of silence before your actual track so laters on you can analyse the silence for noise and setup a FFT filter to clean up the signal in the rest of the song

[Guest Anonymous]

Use "WaveGain" to do the normalizing. Anything else will compromise the quality of the sound.

[Daijoubu]

Just get CoolEdit

[Guest Anonymous]

Down load this program, I've found it works very well.

Oh yeah, it's even free!!!

http://christian.klukas.bei.t-online.de/fi...md/winNetMD.htm