Recording discussion

[jerrodd]

Ok gang. I am at a crossroads, of sorts. I am toying with a portable cassette recorder to record lines away from my good setup at home. It works ok, but I am seeing more and more portable digital recorders coming out (IPOD, for example, and others). Most of the inexpensive ones have internal mics, which probably don't sound all that good. Is there a digital recorder with a decent amount of hard-drive space, able to be monitored with headphones, and able to plug a decent headphone into it? I am having fair luck recording on cassette, digitizing the bits, then tweaking them, but I wanted to know how others record out of their studios.

[Nathan Butler]

I couldn't tell you, personally. I would definitely suggest looking into even the most rudimentary of digital recorders, though. I've done the cassette thing and had very, very little success. We tried to do something like that at Dragon*Con and it really didn't work out very well at all.

Considered a memo device? Just one of those quick buggers?

[recombinant]

...some PDA's have rudimentary recording capability, but I have a feeling they record at a very poor bitrate. But it's worth a try if you've got a Palm or PocketPC device.

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[jerrodd]

Thanks for the response. I actually was looking closely at the Sony High-Speed Net MD MZ-N10 Walkman. It records audio from a mic onto a minidisc, but I wanted to make sure it is in a format I could easily transport into my PC, and mix it down.

[Nathan Butler]

As long as you can get it to your PC to begin with, you should be able to mix it all down. If you run into big problems, like you get it on the computer but you can't get it very compressed size-wise, let me know. I can run it through Media Cleaner for you tweak it as needed.

[Hybrid Sith]

Mini discs are the way to go for this type of work. I have one I use for recording gigs. With the digital mic (inexpensive) I get super clean recordings. If you record in mono you get 180min of record time. Some have built in usb ports and come with software to make transferring/converting to various formats easy. Look for a unit that has a digital-in as opposed to a mic-in. The quality of the digital-in is much better than the mic input and with the digital input you can use different sources. Discs are cheap and you get good quality with any brand.

[recombinant]

...sounds like a good setup. how much are portable mini disc recorders going for these days?

[Hybrid Sith]

Mini discs range from 99.00 to 250.00. Ebay is a great source.

[Nathan Butler]

Ach, me wallet! ARRRRRGH!

Actually, yeah, that's a pretty good price if you hit the low end. But, seriously, just do what I do and just say "I'm poor, so shut up about my recording quality." Works every time. style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink.gif

[recombinant]

very diplomatic.

[jerrodd]

Nate, I had a quick question. The house I just moved into has a few electrical outlets that aren't grounded (It only has two prongs instead of three). I noticed when I recorded last week I heard a slight hum. I moved the mic, and it was still there. I think it is because I was using an ungrounded outlet. Any thoughts on this?

[Nathan Butler]

I have NO idea.

[jerrodd]

Okay. Here's another question. What kind of mics (brand and item #) do you all use to record voices? Thanks.

[Nathan Butler]

Heh, I'm cheap. I use a radio shack quickie mic. Mono.

[Danath Vel'triarr]

Yeah, quickies are good too... Wait, we're talking about microphones arn't we? Damn.

[recombinant]

Hopefully this won't irritate anyone too much, but I'm going to resurrect this post because I'm trying to get my recording issues under control.

I sent these questions as a PM to a fellow board member originally, but thought it might be a good idea to open it up for everyone to share their opinions, experience, etc.

Here's the scenario: I'm currently recording some vocal tracks for a project, but I'm finding two rather annoying problems (listed below).

Before I mention the problems, I thought I'd mention that I'm running a mic directly into my laptop's microphone jack. I don't know if that's how most of you guys who have been doing this for a while have been doing it, but I do have a mixer at my disposal which I could use - if it is generally accepted that having a mixer that brings up the mic levels to line level might help.

Here are the problems I'm having, and would appreciate some advice on improving the quality: The sound is recorded at a very low level when recorded from microphone directly into the microphone input.
When I use an amplification function in my software audio editor to boost the signal, it boosts the volume (good), but also boosts the noise (bad).
So I guess what I'd like to be able to do is record the vocal tracks at an acceptable level in the first place, without having to mess with additional amplification.

Any suggestions you can provide would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

-Evan

[Lunatic]

I hadthe same problem with my laptop. Most laptop soundcard are crap. If you do the same thing with a desktop PC you'll probably have less problem because ordinary PC have decent soundcard.

I bought a good external sound card for my laptop and the amplification problems were solved. Unfortunatly not my wallets. style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/banghead.gif style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/happy.gif

[Nathan Butler]

I run my microphone directly into the mic jack on my Dell Inspiron 8100. I make sure the microphone input volume is all the way up, or close to it, when recording. Then I remove any buzz later. After that, I usually don't need to up the volume further, but after the noise reduction, it can be done without upping any noise.

[recombinant]

Originally posted by Nathan Butler@Sep 10 2004, 04:10 PM
I run my microphone directly into the mic jack on my Dell Inspiron 8100. I make sure the microphone input volume is all the way up, or close to it, when recording. Then I remove any buzz later. After that, I usually don't need to up the volume further, but after the noise reduction, it can be done without upping any noise.
<div align="right">Quoted post</div>


Sounds like you're running a similar system as mine (Dell Inspiron 8200). I'll try to crank up the input and see if that helps. I thought I had it up all the way, but I could be wrong....

[Hybrid Sith]

What kind of software is everyone using for editing and recording?

[Steve Mollmann]

I use Sound Forge 6.0 for both editing and recording, though right now the program is giving me some trouble...

[Hybrid Sith]

Ohhh that's pretty good, fast, really smart undo tool. Do you ever use the Acoustic Mirror?

[recombinant]

When I had my Macintosh PowerBook G3 up and running with OS 8.6, I used Opcode's Vision DSP....

Alas, I can't really use it anymore since upgrading to OS X, so now I'm using my Dell Inspiron 8200 running Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), since I currently lack the funds to purchase a professional/commercial tool like SoundForge. It's an OpenSource, free multi-track audio editor - I was skeptical at first, but it's working out great.

With regard to my earlier problems, I've decided to go with using my Boss 8-channel mixer between the mic and the laptop's line-in, and it's giving much better results now than I was getting with plugging the mic directly into the mic-in.

Hopefully the end result will reflect that. We shall see...

[Hybrid Sith]

I love tring out new editors. Some do this some do that. I used Audacity to create some very usable fx. It was pretty straight forward. I never got into its multitraking functions. I do recall it crashed on me. So I use it no more. I know its creators are always upgrading and making it better.

[Steve Mollmann]

I haven't the slightest idea what the Acoustic Mirror does, so I've never used it. A lot of the program escapes me.
Originally posted by recombinant@Sep 14 2004, 03:10 PM
...I currently lack the funds to purchase a professional/commercial tool like SoundForge.
So do I.
I better shut my mouth now, before I get into trouble.

[Hybrid Sith]

Ahh, I see. Mollmen good buddy of mine. At what retailer can Sound forge be found? Pm me your ansure if you'd like. Anyway with Amirror your recording sound like you recorded in a gym or shed or anywhere else. It ajusts the eq and sonic boundries of the space. Reverb adds the depth. U\You would not use a Gym Amirror w/o reverb...

[Jans_Walker]

Cool Edit Pro Two Point Oh for recording and editing. And Goldwave on the side for a few filters because I like the way some of the filter windows are layed out.

[recombinant]

Somewhere around here I have an old version of Cool Edit - crazy that it's now owned by Adobe and selling for $199 list...

Anyone here used a lower end audio editor like Cakewalk? Is it worthwhile?

[Hybrid Sith]

I used to use cakewalk til i discoverd Audition. Which is a step up from cool edit 2. Sonar XL and Sonar 3 which is cakewalks highend multitrks' might be closer to Cool edit 2 but, cakewalks got years to go. I recamend every one to try the free 30 day trial of Audition 1.5. The only hang up i have bout Audition is no sequensing midi functions.

[recombinant]

Audition is the Adobe-repackaged version of Cool Edit, right? Hmmm... I wouldn't mind trying it, but I probably won't end up shelling out the cash for it. Looks like Audacity's it for me for the time being.

I might go ahead and try one of the lower-end Cakewalk products since it seems to provide the basic features I need.

I'd love to try Sound Forge sometime, however.

For music composition I'm currently playing around with Reaktor and Reason (found old versions on eBay I could actually afford).

[Hybrid Sith]

thats right cool edit 2.0 is Audition with some mods. Does Audacity have efx?

[recombinant]

Well, I haven't worked with it much beyond straight-up editing, but it does have some basic effects... I don't believe it utilizes any standard effect interfaces like DirectX or VST unfortunately. I think it's because it's a cross-platform editor, where those standards don't always apply (except VST, which is available on Win32 and Mac OS, but is not implemented by Audacity).

The effects it does contain seem to be developed by independent developers/contributors (in true Open Source fashion), so I wouldn't be surprised if the list of effects keeps growing...

HTH.

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[recombinant]

HOLD THE PHONE...

I just read the following on the Audacity site (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about.php):
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'>"Built-in effects include Echo, Change Tempo, and Noise Removal, and it also supports VST and LADSPA plug-in effects."[/b][/quote]
...so I guess it does support the VST standard. w00t!