slow cpu good enough for recording

[rich110]

Hi guys,

I need some help as I tried to digitize my vinyls. My motherboard is only XP-AMD 100x10.5=1050MHz. Would that be good enough? Do I need something like 2000MHz? (I know the faster the better but I have spend some money on the HiFi already. If my existing equipment is good enough, I would like keep using them.)

Many thanks

 

[Griffyn]

It all depends on what sort of encoding you're doing. If you're recording them as wave files, then what you've got is more the fine. If you're wanting to compress to MP3 or something on the fly, then I'm not sure - you'd need to test it out. It comes down the harddrive speed as well as CPU.

If you want to record as wave, then compress to MP3 later, then what you've got is still ok.

 

[rich110]

Hi Griffyn,

Tks for your response. When you say wave file do you mean .wav the Microsoft native format? One more thing, if you have a budget of about US$150, which sound card will you choose (mine is on board sound, I guess it won't be appropiate, right?)

 

[Griffyn]

Yup - .WAV files are either not very compressed, or not compressed at all by default (there are some .WAV compression schemes, but they're not very well supported) - I don' know for sure. 1 minute of audio at 16bit stereo and 44Khz sample rate will take up about 10 megabytes.

You can cut that in half if your vinyls are mono - but considering that they're an analog format I'd record at 16bit and 44Khz.

With your onboard sound you'd be surprised at what it's capable of. What the more expensive sound cards offer are more connections (SPDIF, optical, etc.) plus they're far more efficient at sound processing. But I really don't think you're going to be taxing your system with simple recording. The only other thing that the really good sounds cards excel at is very low interference noise. But because you're taking from vinyl, you're going to be getting a whole heap of interference from your player anyway - so I wouldn't worry about that.

 

[rich110]

Hi Griffyn,

Tks, looks as you have quite a lot of experience on this topic. I tired musicmatch jukebox for recording my vinyls. I have to tap the signal from the HiFi through the headphone jack (my Mini HiFi does not have a rec-out). any other suggestion? The Musicmatch has a couplt of drawbacks :

1. I cannot monitor the recording level when recording (no indicator at all, or there might be but I don't know how to turn it on the screen?)

2. You cannot input the names of the track beforehand : all I can do is edit name, play vinyl, start recording, stop vinyl, edit name for the next song and so on. Any other way to record the whole album. Or even other software?

 

[norty303]

One word......Soundforge. Comes with clean up plugins to remove all the scratches and pops/noise too.

 

[rich110]

Hi norty303,

Does Soundforge includes a recorder? I know it's good for the function you mentioned

 

[norty303]

yep, records like a dream with a handy little console to preview your levels before commiting to a take. I use it to record everything including internet radio. Will fulfill all your needs and more....

 

[CitrixEngineer]

For recording Vinyl, consider upgrading your soundcard to a true 24-bit module. 16-bit sound is lossy - if a portion of a sample falls within 2 steps, it is simply dropped. To get a good idea of what this sounds like at an extreme level, listen to an mp3 file recorded at less than 128k. You should hear metallic artifacts in the music where large chunks have been dropped. Listening to a 16-bit CD after this will make the CD sound rich and full. However, compare it with a 24-bit CD, now your ears know what they're listening for. Even a 16-bit professionally produced CD will have an amount of distortion - especially in high-pitched passeges played at high volume.

The loss can be compared to 16-bit images next to 24-bit images. 24-bit images are infinitely sharper and truer (although a professional photographer will always tell you that nothing beats film).


The problem is headroom. The headroom on 16-bit sound is 250 times smaller than with 24-bit audio. 16-bit audio gives you 32,000 steps up and down from zero which means some of the faint signals are only a couple of steps in size at the most. In contrast, 24-bit audio has 8,000,000 steps down and 8,000,000 steps up from ground level.

What does this mean? It means that if you enjoy classical music, or music with very soft and very loud passages, that something has to get clipped. Recording at a very quiet level means that you will lose a lot of harmonic detail - especially in those quiet passages.

Of course, there's a price to pay to record in 24-bit/96Khz. You need 20Mb/min instead of 10. Fortunately hard disks are cheap these days - if you can, upgrade to a 7200 RPM 8Mb Cache model.

A good 24-bit sound module/card will use minimal CPU, so your existing PC should cope well. Check out the Audiophile USB module - it's highly rated as a budget model.

http://musicmall.com/cmp/audiophileusb.htm

Or, if you're in the UK;

http://www.emismusic.com/computeraudiocards.htm

24-bit audio has greater frequency range and harmonic depth - it is reported to be more accurate at reproducing the master source even than analogue methods. Of course, an audiophile will tell you that vinyl is always better than digital music - there's certainly less "warmth".
24-bit is the Hi-Fi of digital music.

Hope this is interesting - and helpful

 

[rich110]

Tks CitrixEngineer, looks as though I can't get away with the 24bit/96kHz (just naming the terms, not familiar with them at all) Hope this time I won't leave it alone after I bought it -- I bought a Canon4550 six years ago, I have just print out less than 10 color print-outs and 500 A3s what a waste!!!

 

[Griffyn]

Good advice everywhere in this thread. CitrixEngineer - very good technical stuff. I'm a bit hazy on audio stepping, so your post was educational.

Rich110, to summarise bitrate and sample rate (24bit and 96Khz), what those numbers mean is that 96000 times per second, the incoming audio stream from your vinyl will be 'sampled' (akin to taking a snapshot with a still camera), and 24 bits of information (3 bytes) will be used to record the audio 'snapshot'. 24 bits is better than 16 because, as CitrixEngineer said, the range of sound it records is greater. This sample rate is per channel (ie left or right).

As an indicator, cassette tapes needn't be sampled any higher than 8bit 22Khz, and recorded speech (from eg. a hand-held recorder) is passable at 8bit 11Khz. CDs need 16bit 44Khz. DVD-Audio can be recorded at multiple rates, the highest being 24bit 96Khz.

You can use these numbers to figure out in advance how large your recorded file will be. For example, recording at 16bit/44Khz you simply multiply (16/8 = 2 bytes) by 44000 by 60 seconds = 5 megabytes per channel per minute, or 10 megabytes per minute for stereo.

Hope that helps.