Michael Fugazzi wrote:
Is it possible (for me easy) to put a record on to CD? The quality won't be as good, but it would be much more functional for a guy like me. Mike
Depends on what you think is easy. You can get a free program called Audacity that does sound recording. Assuming you have a turntable, and it sounds like you do, you need to have the turntable hooked up to the phono input of your amp/receiver. Hook up the line out jacks on the receiver to the line in jack on your pc. You'll need an adapter that has 2 RCA female jacks and one 1/8" stereo plug. (Radio Shack) Plug the adapter into the line in on the sound card and run the audio cables to the RCA jacks on the adapter.
You could run the turntable directly into the sound card but records are equalized to keep the strong bass notes from making the stylus jump out of the groove. The phono input on your receiver is connected to a circuit that undoes the eq. Without it the records will sound terrible. Some new turntables have a built in preamp that takes care of this because a lot of modern stereo/surround sound gear doesn't have a phono input.
The software will enable you to record the record as a .wav file. Audacity doesn't do cd burning, but I'm guessing you have a program that does it. Seems to me that the M$ music player software does it. If you got software with your pc related to the cd drive you probably got something that will work.
If you want to do more than the quick and dirty record and burn, you'll be able to break the .wav file into individual tracks. When you record from the record you'll have one file that doesn't distinguish between the individual tracks.
Here's a link to Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
For $50 or so you can get software that will simplify it a little bit. I'm pretty sure that in that range you can get something that will do the cd burning too. Do a web search on "audio restoration." You still have to do the hookup and break it into tracks. At that price you can also get primitive restoration capabilities like silencing the pops and clicks. You can pay a whole lot more for software that does a good job of noise reduction.
You'll be surprised how good a record in good condition will sound on cd. Even the built into the motherboard sound cards will do a fairly good job. There are cards in the $30-$50 range that have better signal to noise ratios in the analog part than any analog tape recorder most people could afford. Because the signal is relatively low level almost anything can reproduce the audio spectrum accurately. Once it gets digitized there is virtually no compromise of the signal.
PS--there are $2 integrated circuits that do cleaner audio than just about any preamp you could buy 30 or more years ago. Audio technology today is astoundingly better and mind bogglingly cheaper than the first hi-fi equipment.
-- Hear Barrelhouse Solly on the internet--that's me
http://www.soundclick.com/barrelhousesolly
Yes, it's what everyone has been clamoring for--pictures of the cats:
http://ratemykitten.com/my/?gallery=willie_mctell _______________________________________________ Harp-L is sponsored by SPAH, http://www.spah.org Harp-L@xxxxxxxxxx http://harp-l.org/mailman/listinfo/harp-l