Chipdoc (new guy) here with a question. Using Audacity 2.1.2 exe installer and Windows 7 64 bit.
I have many hours of Christmas music…some 10 cassette tapes and some 10 commercial CD’s…that I want to put on a 32 GB SD card and play continuously straight through. Think a big long family Christmas reunion background music project. My plan is to record onto the SD card using a Zoom H4n recorder (line in, not mics) which is capable of recording the audio in WAV 44.1kHz 16 bit or MP3 and thence to Audacity to label the individual song tracks. I may then put some of it on CD’s. My plan is to record onto the SD card initially in WAV 44.1 / 16 in one long continuous file to best do the track labeling work while preserving continuing play beginning to end, then export final product from Audacity as an MP3 file to save space. I have never done this before, so this is just my best guess. Will this work? Is there a better way? Would it be better to do the initial recording in MP3 prior to Audacity? Helpful comments/criticism please.
Do you also have a large hard drive? If so, make your original copies in WAV (or FLAC) format, then if you need MP3 format for the final product, copy the WAV files to MP3. The “WAV” originals are your backup. Copying tapes takes a lot of time, so you will only want to do it once, so ensure that first digital version is as good as possible and not in a lossy format.
For the CDs, “Rip” them rather than record them. “Ripping” is “digital extraction” of the audio from the CD. There are several free programs available that can do this. It’s better quality than recording because it is a direct digital copy, and it’s much quicker (unless the CDs are badly scratched, in which case they will probably be useless anyway). When I was on Windows I used a program called CDex for ripping.
How do you intend to play the finished compilation? On a computer? media player? other? Be specific, the details are important
…in one long continuous file to best do the track labeling work while preserving continuing play beginning to end,
It’s OK if you want to record a cassette (or one side of the cassette) as one long file, but then you’ll want to make individual files for each song. All of the standard tagging (metadata) methods need separate files, each file having it’s own title/artist/album/etc. tags.
and play continuously straight through.
Any audio player software (Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp, etc.) can play a list of individual songs so you don’t need to make one-big file. You can select songs by genre, or make a playlist to play the songs in a particular order, or random shuffle them etc. …Winamp says I’ve got almost 3 days of Christmas music, and I can just select ‘Christmas’ and start. (I’m configured to play randomly.)
Note that metadata for WAV files is not widely supported. So, you might want to go with FLAC if you want lossless files. (And, the files will be almost half the size of uncompressed WAVs.) CDs are lossless and uncompressed, so don’t make a CD from an MP3 unless you don’t have a choice. FLAC is not universally supported and depending on your player-software you may need to add a FLAC CODEC. But just about any CD burning software should be able to decode it.
Would it be better to do the initial recording in MP3 prior to Audacity?
No. As you probably know, MP3 is lossy compression and Audacity (or any other “normal” audio editor) has to decompress it before editing. If you then re-save (re-export) to MP3 (or another lossy format), that’s another generation of lossy compression. If you want MP3 or AAC, compress once as the last step.
…Although MP3 and AAC are lossy, with high-quality settings they can often sound identical to the uncompressed original. But, try to avoid unnecessary lossy-compression.
