Now for the cassettes and 45's!!!

[frederf]

I will add a note about transferring the analog media. Get the highest levels without adding distortion, and DO NOT edit those original transfers. Burn a couple of copies of the WAV files and store them away. Audio restoration software keeps on getting better and better.. especially with those live recordings. And of cours be sure to include a nice long selection of silence from the tapes to be used in noise and hiss elimination. Very useful.. again with impovements in restoration software that WILL come along.

You probably know all that, but it wasn't mentioned... so just for those that may be new to the "art"

fred

[Gagliem]

Yes frederf, I know what you wrote but you're definitely right to mention it as I forgot those new to this art, also you're making me laugh while writing this, because now you make me realize I have a ton of dvds storing all the raw wavs, plus minimum 1TB of recordings remastered.. I'm a complete lunatic :-D

Well, you're right about hiss reduction, minimum you have to leave 1-2 secs of silence recording for each side (tape and vinyl), especially if each side has a different recording, so the hiss may vary and it has to be applied different hiss analysis and reduction.. also if one side has different tracks recorded, each track should have is 1-2secs of silence.

At this point, another thing I didn't mention but it could be useful in vinyl transfer:
if who wants to transfer a vinyl recording to pc doesn't have modern turntables with RIAA equalization built-in, it should be used old preamplifiers which have it and then connect these one to the soundcard inputs, if this can't be done, the recording level would be very low and even if raising the volume, the reult would be a sound with too much low frequencies and with almost no bass... the last chance is to use audacity and perform on the wav file the following steps, using from menu Effect > Equalization, then when the eq window appears, going to "select curve" and choose RIAA and apply this to the whole wav.

Hope this could help...

Cheers
Ema

[vinylmaster]

All good tips, guys! And I do love using Audacity for my files. I'm sure I haven't looked into ALL the features of Audacity yet, but I'm still learning. It seems I'm finding new things to do with Audacity all the time. It makes for a great audio editor, too, if you're trying to splice different sources together. Say you have a 4-hour long radio show, that you taped on 3 separate tapes. You can edit them all together into one file, and save the original file in a lossless format. Then download it to whatever personal device suits your fancy. I like that you can also grab snippets of audio, as well, for special projects. Also good for restoring the sound of those old tapes on their last legs. Anyone with old mixtapes can tell you how priceless some of them are, so restoration will at least preserve the sound, and maybe a few memories, too!