| Home recording and general music post from the archived Yabb Recording Website Message Board. Some of the info here may be outdated but many of the audio recording and home studio tips are still good. Note: The only tags I made and attempt to convert are italics, bold, center and underline. So if you see some gibberish surrounded by brackets, just ignore it.
Recording Website Archived Yabb board Post
Febuary 2001 Yabb Message Board Archive
Subject: PC Recording Workshops - Real Time
by Delta227 | 06/05/01 at 11:12:37
I presently record Lectures, Seminars, Workshops, etc. Some go up to 36 hours over several days. My equipment is wireless mics, mixer, compressor/limiter and anti-feedback computer for house feeds at mic level.
The recording equipment is a Sony Mini-Disk and a dual pocket Tascam 302 cassette deck all at line level.
I feed the Minidisk analog audio into Cakewalk Home Studio 8.0 for editing. However that has to be done in real-time so I have to double the time - record and then play (feed) into Cakewalk. Then I can do the editing. Most recordings are done on a 45 minute basis for C-90 cassettes as end product.
I want to do the recording in digital format to feed directly into Cakewalk without the analog to digital to analog to digital conversions.
I want to do all recording on a laptop if possible, with another nedia as backup.
Anyone know of products, processes, software, methods, etc that might help?
Jack@SeminarSounds.com
Subject: Re: PC Recording Workshops - Real Time
by Charlie | 06/19/01 at 12:55:25
You still haven't had a response?
I just found this forum but my needs are the same as yours.
We do recordings over the phone and at seminars and later distribute to members on cassette.
I've looked at minidisc but like you, I don't want to duplicate my efforts because I can't find a format that transfers faster than real time. Pretty disappointing considering DAT and minidisc are digital. Not much progress there.
I would use the laptop as the primary recording device and do a simultaneous recording to the minidisc 'just in case'.
For that I would look at an analog to USB convertor from the mixer to the laptop's USB port.
If that interests you I'll dig up my links to sources for those.
From you, I'd like to know more about that feedback thingy.
And do you find a compressor/limiter better than a noise gate?
Charlie
Subject: Re: PC Recording Workshops - Real Time
by JR#97 | 06/19/01 at 13:30:04
Is the quality of going straight to PC going to make a difference? Not really. I've done mastering on many live lectures, seminars, etc and what makes the most difference is the room itself and the mic and/or speaker. A few AD/DA conversions won't make a difference unless you have really bad converters. Especially considering your final format is cassette. And also consider that 8 times out of 10 those tapes are played in the car.
If time is your biggest consideration, you may want to consider using digital video and importing into your pc via a firewire card. That way you can import faster than real time. Personally, I feel DAT is the way to go for lectures/seminars/voice stuff. Small, digital, easy to use and store.
Also, you don't have to import everything to PC to edit. Since it isn't music, you can stop/start anywhere. At least you're not stuck doing the tape, splice block, and band aid method!
Subject: Re: PC Recording Workshops - Real Time
by Angus_Podgorny | 06/19/01 at 18:46:31
Look into the Digigram™ V2 Laptop Sound Card. It has 24-bit converters and spdif in and out. Records 2 channels of audio simultaneously. I dunno... between what you have now and something like this, it sounds as though you'd be set.