Re: Re: [Harp-L] Recording advice needed

["Tim Moyer" <wmharps@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dave Murray wrote:
> Joe Spiers wrote:
> >I have a VHS tape compilation of live performances by the late 
> >Kansas City bluesman Little Hatch, which I purchased at a 
> >fundraiser benefit for his family shortly after his death. I 
> >would like advice about how to transfer the audio to cd format, 
> >and possibly a program to mix it for better quality. Would this 
> >be something one of the digital recorders would do nicely? This 
> >isn't for the purpose of creating bootlegs; I just hate thinking 
> >I'm wearing the tape out every time I watch it or risk the 
> >machine eating it, so it just sits on the shelf.
> 
> Since the VHS tape is analog, the stereo out jacks on the VCR can 
> be fed to a PC and the songs can be captured with the free 
> software program called Audacity. With a plug-in (Lame) you can 
> save that as MP3 files and copy those to a CD. There is other  
> free software, like MediaCoder that can convert that to Vorbis or 
> WMA if you prefer. I made a CD from a VHS tape not long ago using 
> that method. A one of a kind harp CD.

Despite all the knocks about VHS as a poor video format, the big fat 
tape works pretty darn well on the audio side, with a signal-to-
noise ratio often in excess of 98db.  I, too, recommend capturing 
the audio onto a PC in digital form, and since you pretty much have 
to play the tapes in real-time, you could just connect the stereo 
outputs of a VCR to the audio inputs of a computer sound card, and 
record using Audacity, as Dave suggests.  You can do a few test runs 
to get the signal at a good level, and even post process the audio 
if you like (Audacity has some de-noise filtering, though I don't 
have much experience with it).  

Once you have captured it in digital form, I would recommend 
exporting it directly from Audacity as WAV and not MP3, if the goal 
is to record it to CD.  Assuming you have less than 70 or so 
minutes, you can write the Audacity content to a .wav file 
uncompressed (about 700 megabytes) and then drag that directly onto 
most CD burning software (like Sonic RecordNow!) for conversion to 
CD (WMA) format.  

Writing from Audacity to MP3 first is going to lose some of the 
original fidelity, and the compression process out of Audacity is 
slower than writing the uncompressed data straight out.  If you 
write to MP3 first, you will be compressing, then uncompressing 
the "lossy" data back to WMA (CD format).  

Of course, if you want to carry the performance around on your iPod 
or other MP3 player, or make a PodCast out of it, you can also use 
Audacity to write a second, MP3 compressed version.  

My two cents,

-tim