Many greetings to all you good people across the pond.
It’s getting late here now. I just wanted to say Thank You again for all your suggestions and help. I think I have it under control now, just a bit more fine tuning.
To Gale, Thank You for the leads. To Hellosailor, it really helped to understand that I was making one file, and to Thor, I get your drift and feel much the same.
The school holidays will begin soon, and we will take the kids camping in Italy. We will head South to the Alps (one and a half hours away),then camp overnight on one of the lakes in the mountains,which are surprisingly warm.
We will then head to the Mediteranean coast, close to Venice.
Last Easter we found this lovely camping ground right on the sea, a short bus and boat ride to the Venetian city proper.
Venice is great. Very crowded with lots of tourists, but if you get away from the main thouroughfares and explore the back streets,it really is an extraordinary place. It would normally be an expensive place to visit, but the camping ground is quite reasonable,and we always take a picnic lunch and drinks with us. It’s a pity I can’t attach some pictures.
Warm Regards to all
Dave
He who laughs last; thinks slowest.
If you think nobody cares, try missing a couple of payments
“I am not a music engeneer either.”
Well, if you’re making custom mix CDs, which is what you say you are doing, some folks might call that a recording engineer.
If you are recording LPs one track at a time, you’re lifting and lowering the tone arm five or six times instead of just once per side, and no matter how nimble you are, that means 5-6x more risks of dropping the arm and 5-6x more work going back and forth.
I’d have to ask why bother? Let the album side play, mark the tracks in Audacity, and just CUT OUT the ones you don’t want. Which also allows you to use the multiple track export and export and tag all the tracks from that album in one batch. If you don’t want to do things the simple way, you’ll just be making more work for yourself.
Either way, unless I’m missing a new feature, Audacity doesn’t burn to CDs. If all of your WAV files are not being burned to the CD, that’s a problem with how you export/group/save files or how your CD-burning software is being used. AFAIK.
I’m going really good with this program,and I’ve finally burnt my first two sets of tapes to CD. (Don’t ask how many CDs it took).
I have two further questions.
Firstly.
When I am doing the "Add label at selection"thing. I always mess up the blue wavy line when I try to get it all on the screen to work with it. It always gets really big or really small,sometimes I lose it all together. Using the little magnifying glasses helps a bit, but it seems if I click on the blue line it does all sorts of weird things.
Is there a quick and simple way to work with the track on the screen without moving it around to much.
Secondly.
My daughter likes to sing and play guitar. I told her I think this program would be good for her to record and listen to herself. Is that possible, and would she need a headset with a microphone or a standing microphone or what.
The guys at the electrical store say I need to buy recording equipment to the value of several hundred bucks, but I don’t want to go down that road, at least not yet.
I’ve got to the stage where I can remove even little clicks between the tracks, is that great or what?
An easy way to zoom out so that you can see the entire recorded track is to press Ctrl+F
If you click somewhere on an audio track you should see that there is a vertical line at the place that you click - this is the “playback position”. If you then press Ctrl+1 (Ctrl and number one) the track will zoom in on the playback position. Pressing Ctrl+3 will zoom back out.
If you “lose” the playback position, press Ctrl+F to zoom to the entire track, then zoom back in with Ctrl+1.
Yes, Audacity is good for that sort of thing.
For getting started, almost any microphone will do, though the sound quality may not be brilliant. I’ve heard some remarkably good results (for the price) from a $15 Logitec USB desktop microphone.
USB microphones have the advantage that they completely bypass the computer sound card (most standard sound cards are pretty rubbish for microphone recordings).
I’d probably not recommend using a headset microphone - while headsets are good for Skype and similar they are often not so good for recording unless you get a really expensive one, and even then they are not good for recording a guitar.
One of the main problems with USB microphones is that they need to be used quite close to the computer, so it will tend to pick up some fan noise from the computer, but even so you should be able to record well enough to have a lot of fun with it for a very small budget.
“Except that not all CD players will play CDRWs.”
I would suggest that all computer CD-drives for the past 15?20? years will read them. And since the goal is to avoid burning coasters on the computer, using CD-RWs is the perfect way to test the burning process. Once it finally burns OK and plays back OK on the computer’s drive, a regular CD can be burned.
But not all CD players will play a “burned” CD of any kind at all. Older CD players originally were designed only for the highly reflective pressed CDs and won’t play any kind of home-brew CD at all.
