Heartland

Ok people without getting to techy so i will not understand or lose my way i have shed loads (100+) of Live tapes,demos and the like from 81- 85 (the best years??) that i wish to get onto those new shiny disc things (CD's). I have seen things like the Terratec Box that will allow loading to PC and cleaning of the noise etc.But is this the best what are my other options and so on.need to keep it easy and quick.I can then get onto CDr and away we go in the weeding room!! I know that somebody out there can advise whats best......ps limited budget..... i think its about time i put some stuff into the weeding room to share with the masses!

Apologies for going off-topic, but are you the Sodium Haze that made the discography book?

@ Sodium Haze (and anyone else who is remotely interested )

There are 2 basic approaches you can take:

1) input the music through to the sound card of your PC, and use your computer to record, then use some software gubbins to edit/de-hiss etc etc. Once finished, burn yer file to a nice shiny disc

2) connect your source (eg tape) to an amplifier. Then connect the amplifier to an AUDIO CD recorder. Basically it's like using the CD recorder as it were a tape deck. Except the noise goes onto a nice shiny disc

The first option is probably the cheapest, and will probably be ok if your computer is up to the task of sampling to CD quality. Ours isn't so we had to (shh, spend money )

Try the first option anyway, It's got to be worth a go ('specially if you've got 100's of the beggars )

I'm sure other members of this forum will be only to happy to help out on the techy questions, but if you want a beginners guide, feel free to PM me

Many thanks for that info will maybe PM you on it but think i get the concept.will try and sort shortly after i checked my lap top etc etc.

On the other question:
Yes i did produce the Discography book that Andrew Pinnell featured etc.seems like a 100 yrs ago ,still got the original master and bits and bobs to it.If there is enough interest i'll see if i can get a few together for anybody out there,maybe trade for some items?????

SODIUM HAZE wrote:Yes i did produce the Discography book that Andrew Pinnell featured etc.seems like a 100 yrs ago ,still got the original master and bits and bobs to it.If there is enough interest i'll see if i can get a few together for anybody out there,maybe trade for some items?????

I know there's crazy people on this forum who'll treat all that almost as if it's official merchandise and pay you silly money for it. Congratulations!

On the main question, you need to connect your tape deck to your pc through the line-in socket. Some tape decks can connect straight to line-in whereas others will have to go through your amp and the amp connects to line-in (but be careful not to have it too lout and blow your soundcard!) You may have to experiment as I found I got an a slight hum when I did this. When I first got my pc I actually made some mp3's by connecting the headphone socket to line-in. Ugh!! It's a learning curve but at least there's people here to offer advice. In the end I found the best way for me was to have the cassette deck going through my minidisc recorder (as if I was recording to minidisc), except my md is on pause and I just use it to pass the sound through as there's no mains hum and it gives a lovely clear signal.

Once you've found the best way to connect your audio source to pc you'll need some mp3 recording software. I use musicmatch but there's many freeware progs on the net that'll do just as well. When transferring audio the main thing you have to remember is not to have it too loud. If it's too quiet it can be fixed, but if it's too loud the tops of all your peaks will get flattened and it'll sound crackly in parts. If you've done any trades youre bound to have heard one or two like this.

Once it's recorded to wav (not mp3) you'll need some audio editing software. I use soundforge. (Soundforge is also useful for checking your levels. Just record about 20 seconds of audio and load it into soundforge to have a look at the sound wave to make sure it's not too loud.) With Soundforge you'll be able to edit off the silence off the start and end of the recording, sort out uneven left and right channel volume levels (or sometimes one channel is so useless you throw it away and just use the good channel), edit out the gaps where people stopped and restarted the tape (do a tiny crossfade and nobody will notice the edit), use the equaliser to remove hiss (it's quite destructive of high frequency sounds unless you make your own custom settings so it's kindof a tradeoff between having huge amounts of hiss or losing the high frequency sounds), and finally normalise it.

After all that you've got a huge wav of the gig. Then you can save it as one big wav or chop it up into tracks, and burn to cd. I'd recommend leaving it as one track otherwise as soon as someone makes a copy they'll muck it up and the copy has tiny gaps between tracks.

Before you do anything - check with others if there isn't already a low-gen transfer available. It would be a shame to find that you've put all the hard work in for something that not many people would interested in. Do you have a list?

Karst wrote:Before you do anything - check with others if there isn't already a low-gen transfer available. It would be a shame to find that you've put all the hard work in for something that not many people would interested in. Do you have a list?

I was thinking the same thing. Some of my early tape to pc transfers aren't so good. When you're transferring audio to cd it's a bit of a learning curve and it'll take a while for you to get good at it. As all the existing Sisters gigs are already available on cd it'd be a shame to weed out what may turn out to be inferior copies. One project for someone is to compile a cd of all the interviews as I've not seen anyone do that yet.

When I installed Nero CD burning software (version 6, I believe) onto my laptop, it screwed with the DVD player. My DVD of Wake would still show the picture, but not the sound. Then, when Miracle was finally released locally http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/miracle/large.html and I hired it at murderous new release prices - no sell-through DVD is available yet - it wouldn't play at all. I had to un-install Nero and haven't gone anywhere near it for ages. Also, Nero tech support is in Germany (there's no Live Help) and it takes days for them to respond to requests. Seems everyone else around here has been burning their own CDs for years.

Black Biscuit wrote:When I installed Nero CD burning software (version 6, I believe) onto my laptop, it screwed with the DVD player. My DVD of Wake would still show the picture, but not the sound. Then, when Miracle was finally released locally http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/miracle/large.html and I hired it at murderous new release prices - no sell-through DVD is available yet - it wouldn't play at all. I had to un-install Nero and haven't gone anywhere near it for ages. Also, Nero tech support is in Germany (there's no Live Help) and it takes days for them to respond to requests. Seems everyone else around here has been burning their own CDs for years.

what DVD software do you use? I've been using various versions of PowerDVD and Nero together for ages...

Update Nero, if you are using any copy of Nero 6 BEFORE 6.3 that may be causing you some problems. The initial release was very buggy. If you have a serial number, then go to :

http://www.nero.com/en/631934351031098.php

Download the demo, run the program, it will ask for a serial number if you have one.

Also, if you happened to put on WinDVD 5 at any point there is a problem with that in which it shows the pics, but no sound. I fixed this by getting WinDVD 6