Seeking sound card recorder recommendation (1 Viewer)

[Steve_Ch]

I am looking for a recorder to record off my sound card, recording includes old records (probably line-in), internet radio (probably wav). Tried a couple off Cnet download, but really did not work all that well, anybody has any favorite? BTW, I use Musicmatch Jukebox for my internet radio and general audio management.

 

[JeremyFr]

If your looking for recording software you could check into Sound Forge its pretty popular somewhat powerful software for recording 2 channel audio in different formats gives you different eq capabilities etc.

The big question here though is going to be be actually 2 questions.

1.) is your soundcard a full duplex soundcard, what this means is can it record and playback at the same time

2.) how fast is your processor & hard drive.

These 2 things can be a make or break situation with recording different materials. With recording compressed source's like MP3 and high quality net radio having a slower processor can hinder recording greatly due to the processor having to use so much power to decompress the audio its playing. I really would not suggest trying to do this with anything less than a 1ghz processor these days.

It also depends on what format you're recording in i.e. .wav .mp3 etc and also other criteria like sample rate what bit depth you want to use i.e. 16bit, 20bit, 24bit etc. All these criteria will change total processor power and hard drive speed you will need to make a quality recording.

 

[Steve_Ch]

Thanks Jeremy. The recordings are mainly for archival purposes (old LPs) and fooling around (off internet broadcast). I like to have good recordings, but not really looking for pro level. Offhand, I say vanilla MP3 format as baseline, and I will play with that to see if higher bit rate, MP3Pro,.. makes any audible differences in my modest setup.
The box is a Dell 1.8G P4 with 1G of DDR and running a generic SB Live 5.1. The couple that I tried that I said did not really worked was not because of sound quality type of problem. One broke the MusicMatch Jukebox, the other one, after setting up according to their instruction, did not record anything, it did show that it wrote stuff to file, but whatever it was, it was not audible.

 

[JeremyFr]

Well the SBlive is definately full duplex, and everything looks fine spec wise as well.

The other thing that gets everyone including me is setting the computer to record the right thing many times it defaults to something like the mic or line in when in fact usually best to just select "what you hear" or master to record off of.

Sound Forge is relatively inexpensive and has alot of nice features and editing functions especially great for cleaning up LP's.

 

[Steve_Ch]

Thanks, I will sniff around and see what Sound Forge is like.