Audacity Forum

After 4 months I finally managed to record 1 side of a LP record with 6 songs on it.I named it and saved it to MY DOC's and put it in an New folder called AUDACITY Music Files.As usual I must have done sonething wrong because when I accessed it it would not open. A box popped up ("Error opening project"--Couldn't find the data folder) I do not recall deleting anything?
Do you have to save files twice?;or save them to a special place?;before you send them to the WAV file?(I have not figured this out yet?)

One way or the other I am going to get some LP's recorded to CD's if I have to Hire someone to come in here and show me how to do it. I have a terrable time comprehending anything PC or WWW and I hate to keep asking stupid questions to this Forum but right now this is all I have and everyone has been very patient and understanding.I THANK YOU FOR THAT!

I can't think of a good stupid joke here, so I'll just dig you out. Rain check.

The "Save" options all produce Audacity Project files, not sound files. Project files are what you want if you're in the middle of an insanely complicated edit with 35 sound clips and special effects--and you need to close up shop and come back tomorrow just where you left off.

What you probably want is Export to WAV...

This might be a good time to suggest Audacity settings for CD creation.
Audacity, Preferences, Audio I/O, Recording, 2-channel stereo.
Audacity, Preferences, Quality, 44100 Hz, 16 Bit.
Those are actually Audacity capture settings, but you may already have those set from your earlier experiences. 44.1 is "CD Quality". It's only considered Good, not Excellent, remembering it was designed at the dawn of digital audio.

Windows Audio Files, piano.wav for example, are excellent quality, uncompressed, completely self-contained sound files that just about everybody can open on any computer. You can email one to me and I will be able to open it with no difficulty.

They should drop right into your CD burning program. You do have a CD burning program, right? You can't just pull sound files over to a CD and burn. Depending on the machine, that will produce a data disk, not a music disk. It might work in your computer, but won't play in your car, truck or stand-alone CD player when you go running or biking through the San Gabriel Mountains.

Each music selection should be saved as one .WAV file so you can skip and select tracks in the CD. You can burn a whole vinyl album to one .wav file, but that will produce a CD where you have to scan slowly through a half-hour worth of music to get to the last song. I've done that. It sucks.

One of my PC machines has Nero software and another has Roxio Easy CD Creator. A CD Authoring Program may have come with your computer--especially if it has a burner drive in it. That drive is pretty much useless without the accompanying software.

"Nero" is a rolling joke. A music CD is a ROM, Read Only Memory. That makes the program Nero Burning ROM (ROM--Rome, get it, arf, arf, arf.)

Koz

I know a GOOD STUPID JOKE it' called rburrhead
Again Thanks for answering, I made a copy of your answer and i will start working on it tomorrow. I do have much of what you mentioned . but a bunch of other CRUD has happened and I can't FACE it tonight.

OH IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE
GOODNIGHT MISS CALIBASH WHERE EVER YOU ARE!!!!

Probably a bad time to point out that it's Mrs. Calabash.

Tomorrow is Friday.

Koz

I have not started working on a reply to your last HELP quote yet, but I was suprised you knew about Mrs Calabash (I cant spell either)
I knew it was Friday because I opened the "F" tab in my weekly Med',s BOX.

Just so you will know, my COMPUTER SKILL LEVEL is just short of being = to A Monkey trying to make love to a football. (if you know what i mean)
Now I need to get to work answering you so you can help me somemore!!!!!

Here goes Something or maby Nothing, I took me 4 (FOUR) hours to write this. Thank God for COPY & PASTE

I don't even know where to start???? ( " RAIN CHECK"[KOZ])

1. ( [KOZ]What you probably want is Export to WAV)
I do want to do this, but don't I have to do all my EDITING first? Are you saying I can save files to WAV? and EDIT later? Without saving it in thr AUDACITY Program?

2. I do have the settings you specified:
Audio I/O, Recording, 2-channel stereo.
Quality, 44100 Hz, 16 Bit.(should this be set higher? If so what setting do you reccomend?)

3. ([KOZ]Windows Audio Files, piano.wav for example, are excellent quality)
are you talking about WMP10 WAV files?

4. I have several CD burning programs, I use Pinnacle the most but I have NERO, WMP10 and probebly some i don't even know I have. Media Player Classic that comes with K-LITE CODEC pack may have a burner but I don't know.

5. ([KOZ]Each music selection should be saved as one .WAV file so you can skip and select tracks in the CD)
All I want to do is transfer the music from the Vinyl and burn a whole vinyl album to one .wav file, and then to a CD. Right now I only have 1 side in the AUDACITY program, I want to do the other side, and many,many more.
QUESTION: should each side of the Record be a seperate AUDACITY program. If I am able to get the files burned to a CD, I will then select files from the CD to RIP into WMP10.


When i select "Export as WAVE" from the "FILE" menu, WHAT happens?
Do I have to have a place ready to put the exported files in?

Sorry about this BOOK. I tried to stick to your " RAIN CHECK" plus some things I wanted to ask. I hope I don't BURN you out on ME????

YOU HAVE A NICE DAY!!!

1. After capturing one side of a record, I would immediately Export as WAV.... BGoodmanHelsinkiSide1.wav. That represents your live capture master. Make copies of that, clicks, pops and all onto a second drive. Any valuable work should exist on two different spinning platters. It could be a second drive inside your big deskside PC, or it could be a portable USB drive. If one hard drive becomes defective, you don't flush months of hard work down the toilet. You can use the backup. I would not leave both drives connected to the computer during editing.

Pull one of those performance files into Audacity and edit your brains out. When you're done, Export a Uniquely named WAV file that will be burned to a CD later. Do Not name it the same as the capture masters. Somebody else posted earlier about trying to do this. Terrible idea.

2. <<<44.1>>>. Those are the settings for CD quality audio. You can capture and edit at a higher quality--and some would urge you to do that--but I think simple and good works here. Especially since the noisy vinyl represents the weak link in the chain.

3. Windows Media Player and I don't get along, especially version WMP10 which I found to be intrusive and in some cases damaging to my work. I use Windows 2000 and no Windows Media at all. You'll need to hit somebody else with that question.

4. So there's no shortage of CD authoring programs. I would stay away from WMP10. You may discover that you are only allowed to make three CD copies of the work or something evil like that. I don't trust Windows Media.

5. <<<All I want to do is transfer the music from the Vinyl and burn a whole vinyl album to one .wav file, and then to a CD.>>>

I personally don't think that's a good idea. Export the initial live vinyl capture as one whole side of the record WAV file (plus one protection copy) and then break it up into individual songs by editing later. Once you have the first capture, you can do anything you want. That's why that first capture is so important and you should have two physically separated copies of it. And by the way, I wouldn't go over two (main and a backup). At three copies, most people get sloppy and forget which copy is good and which one is a damaged backup.

5b. <<<When i select "Export as WAVE" from the "FILE" menu, WHAT happens?
Do I have to have a place ready to put the exported files in? >>>

Yup. The program will ask you what you want to call it (See: Benny Goodman, above) and where you would like it to go. Put one copy on the second hard drive in your computer and the second, protection copy on your external USB drive. Did I just buy two new hard drives for you? Live audio and video productions are a lot bigger than Excel spreadsheets and Word documents.

Later, when you get good and tired of capturing vinyl (Benny Goodman, Side 1 and Side 2, Paul Whiteman Side 1 and Side 2..... you can pull one of the capture WAV files back into Audacity and perform what we in Hollywood call "post" or post production. Remove the clicks and pops, adjust the volume, cut the performance into acts and save each one in a separate folder called BGoodmanFinals. Pull songs out of that folder in whatever order you like and dump them into your CD authoring program and burn.

I make that sound so easy, don't I?

There's another reason I'm urging you to save each side of the vinyl as one valuable capture WAV file plus backup. Unlike CDs, each time you put needle to vinyl it wears out a little more. If you try to do everything in one go--capture, clean, adjust, depop, edit, export, burn, and you mess up anywhere in the process, you're back to playing and capturing the vinyl again--only this time it's a little fuzzier with a few more pops....

Koz

Just to add a little to Koz' excellent and extensive reply (he does make it sound easy doesn't he) ....

I totally agree with him that you will be much better off breaking your LP recordings up into separate tracks (but only after all your editing click repair etc). If you don't do that then you will end up with a CD with just a single track - thus finding an individual "track" within the CD will be hard work - think about it, that it is how all commercial CDs are laid out - even those with gapless playing between tracks (e.g. Sgt Pepper).

It is very easy to break the project into tracks: you just make a label at each track break (not forgetting one right at the beginning for the first track) and then use Audacity's Export Multiple to export a set of WAV files, one per track. There is good advice in the Audacity Wiki on this http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... ate_tracks

But the very best advice Koz has given you is about making backup safety copies (people get sloppy and stop doing this - then regret it later when they lose hours of work) ........

WC

WOW

HOLY MACKEREL ANDY THIS IS ANOTHER FINE MESS I DONE GOT INTO

Well I have said THANKS so many times I don't know what to say, EXCEPT THANKS AGAIN to both KOZ and WC
It is going to take me a little(did I say LITTLE) time to digest all this GREAT ADVICE I have been given and I have a lot of LEARNING to do. I have allready found out that trying to fix CLICKS & POPS don't work to well. It says it won't effect the audio but it does, it makes the audio FUZZY if you go too sensitive. I gave up and set it back to mid-range.

I hope the rain dont hurt the rhubarb (That applies to ME ONLY)

ok next mini tutorial........

Personally I have never had much joy with the click removal effect in Audacity - so what I have done is to remove them manually. Version 1.3 of Audacity is much better for this as the developers have added a new "Repair" effect - this will mend a broken portion of waveform, up to 128 samples, by interpolating from the neighbouring waveforms.

To use it you really need to zoom in (use the magnifying glass icon) to the level where you can see the individual samples (little dots will shoe on the waveform). Then select up to 128 samples 1.3.x has a counter display at the bottom to help with this - then click Effect/Repair (if you are doing a lot of repairs then so long as you don't use any other effect meanwhile then Repair will remain the current effect and you can use the Ctrl-R shortcut. In 1.2.x of Audacity you will have to instead use the pencil tool to redraw the waveform manually. It's probably worth testing the repair before moving to the next one.

BTW: a useful tip for finding the clicks is to use the "Spectrum" view of the project rather that "Waveform" - click on the little downward pointing triangle in the control box of the track to get a dropdown to do this. Clicks/pops will show up as strong bold vertical lines. But I recommend switching back to the Waveform view for the actual Repair.

If you get a really big click/pop that's bigger than 128 samples then you can try selecting the whole lot and deleting the offending noise. This however may leave you with a disjoint waveform (which would sound like a click itself). To solve this, simply zoom in as soon as you have done the delete without moving the cursor. Then select some samples either side and apply the "Repair". This does not always work - so certainly test this and use the Undo function to go back to where you were before (i.e. undo the REpair and the Delete).

This manual process is very time consuming, but produces excellent results - well worth doing if you have treasured recordings that can no longer be purchased on modern media.

BTW: I also use Audacity mainly for transcribing/repairing vinyl & tapes - and 1.3 has proved well stable enough for these relatively modest needs (you will also get better label handling in 1.3 as an added bonus).

WC