recording album sides and dividing to separate tracks

[Jack Riley]

I'm a new user and am trying to figure out how to record an album side and then divide into separate tracks when I save to WAV. I'm using Mac OSX and the help pages make it seem like that is only possible on PC's. Does'nt seem right...........anyone have the solution? Keep it simple for this newbie if possible.
Thanks,
Jack

[kozikowski]

Project > Add Label At Selection (Apple-B) in the gutters between cuts. Then File > Export Multiple and Audacity should break your show up into cuts according to the label positions.

There's a trick to it....umm....shucks....

I think everybody forgets to put a label at the front of the first cut.

Then gather up all the exported WAVs and drop them into iTunes, assemble a playlist, and burn your brains out to get a music CD.

Is that fuzzy-warm enough?

Koz

[waxcylinder]

Then gather up all the exported WAVs and drop them into iTunes, assemble a playlist, and burn your brains out to get a music CD.

Koz

Or gather up all the WAVs for an album into a folder in the right order - I find it helps to label my tracks: 01 <track_1_name> , 02 <track_2_name> etc. - Then use CD burning software to create a CD.

Then use iTunes to rip the CD in the normal way you do with commercial CDs.

If your'e lucky the Gracenote database may recognize the content of the CD you made and will provide the tag data (CD title, track names etc.) for you - saving you a fair amount of typing.

WC

[kozikowski]

I wonder if those music recognition programs would get killed by having the wrong number of seconds in each track. The cut length, of course, is completely dependent on where-when you pressed Apple-B.

Why are we ripping the finished CD?

Koz

[waxcylinder]

A fair proportion of the CD's I make are recognized by Gracenote CDDB with no problem - maybe it looks at the track itself without the silences? But, like you Koz, it did surprise me when it happened the first time - I never expected it to work.

We are ripping the CDs as it enables me to rip at 192 now with my smaller iPod and then easily re-rip later when I get a bigger iPod. Are you suggesting, Koz, that ripping these CDs is a bad way to go?

WC

[kozikowski]

I personally execute live performances at 48000/16 (jury's out on 32000-floating) to get the highest possible quality that makes sense*.

(*24-bit is unstable on Macs and anything higher is a complete waste of time and disk space.)

Those Capture Masters are then the source for everything else--usually at lower quality. Make a music CD and it resamples down to 44100. The compressed iPod formats benefit greatly from having a top quality master to work with. On top of that, any effects you do are more graceful, clear, and transparent at 48000.

We need to remember that 44100 is a compromise format designed in 1979 to smash as much music as possible onto a shiny plastic disk and still have most, but certainly not all, people accept the result without question. The more you do effects in a borderline format like 44100 (normalize, equalize, noise reduce), the worse it sounds and it goes pretty quickly. The other formats, like MP3 and AAC are lossy and intentionally damage the music with the goal of making the files much smaller.

The cheapest MiniDV Camcorder for sale at the electronics 7-Eleven has two channels of uncompressed 48000/16, and is, by the way, not always a dreadful way to capture a live sound performance. Import in iMovie and export the sound channels.

Koz

[steve]

I personally execute live performances at 48000/16 (jury's out on 32000-floating) to get the highest possible quality that makes sense*.

If I'm on my Windows machine and I'm capturing specifically for CD, I use 44.1/16 so that no further conversion is necessary. On my Linux machine I have to use 48 kHz as 44.1 is not supported for my hardware.

If I'm going to be doing a lot of editing (Normalise, Eq, Noise Reduction, Compression, Normalise again, etc.) I will use 32 bit. A simple (but extreme) example is to amplify a wave by -50 dB, then amplify it again by +50 dB. The screenshot below shows the difference when doing this with a sine wave - the upper track is 16 bit and clearly shows noise that has been introduced by the processing. The lower track is 32 bit and introduces no noticeable noise.

distortion.png (3.62 KiB) Viewed 1692 times

The cheapest MiniDV Camcorder for sale at the electronics 7-Eleven has two channels of uncompressed 48000/16,

Camcorders often have AGC (automatic gain control) which can make a real mess of music recordings.

[waxcylinder]

If I'm on my Windows machine and I'm capturing specifically for CD, I use 44.1/16 .

I capture and edit my LPs/tapes/minidiscs with Audacity set at 32-bit 44.1kHz - and then downsample on export to 16-bit 44.1KHz with the WaAV export.

As Steve's waveforms show, this gives better data quality for editing - but gets the WAVs out at CD standard - the results sound good (on good equipment) to my ageing ears ...

WC

[Jack Riley]

Thanks for the help! Much appreciated.
Jack