Need instruction for doing church sermon recordings

[jdw103]

Dear Audacity Forum,
I am seeking any step-by-step information/instructions for recording our church sermons to burn to cd and distributing to our shut-in's. I am a newbie to this forum and also to Audacity. Currently, we are recording to cassette tape recorder, coming out of our Bogan amplifier system. We are just coming out of the record output of the Bogan amp and into the panasonic cassette tape recorder record input .... using rca jacks on both ends. We would like to take that same signal output from our Bogan amp and send to my Acer, model Aspire 5532, laptop computer mic in and do away with the cassette recorder. I am using Windows 7, home premium, 64bit operating system. The mic input on the laptop is a standard 1/8th jack. I have version 1.2.6 Audacity and have downloaded the extra plug-ins . I have realtek hd sound card in the computer. I am attaching 2 recording clips that I did as a testing run. I have noticed that on the clips, there are places where the audio isn't clean, the music is terrible, some words distorted, some pitch problems, etc... I am really new at this and would appreciate Audacity instruction for the correct settings as how to get the very best recording. Once I get a good clean recording, then I will trim, cut and paste, make stereo track from the mono recording and export out as .wav < Using a lower bit rate > and then burn to cd straight from the laptop computer. Thanking you all in advanced for the schooling that I hope to get.

I hope the links here work .... new at this too.

http//:www.sendspace.com/file/t1p2r8
http//:www.sendspace.com/file/sfprle

Regards,
Jerry Wilbanks

[steve]

Just a couple of points to start with:
It is not a good idea to post your e-mail address anywhere on the internet unless you want to be on every spammers mailing list forever. I highly recommend removing your e-mail address from your previous post.
For Windows 7 you need to use Audacity 1.3 (current version 1.3.12) - the old 1.2.6 has a lot of problems on modern machines.
The on-board sound cards in Acer laptops are pretty poor. I have an Acer Aspire 5735 laptop, which I'm very happy with, but the sound card sucks. For recording from a mixing desk/cassette player to my laptop I use a Behringer UCA 202 external sound card which is pretty cheap but massively better than the on-board sound. One of the other forum regulars uses an Edirol UA-1EX which is probably better than the Behringer, but more expensive.

I think that a lot of the sound quality problems are directly attributable to your on-board sound card. If you are on a really tight budget, we can probably make some suggestions to improve the sound quality from what you have now, but a relatively small investment in a better sound card would in my opinion do much better.

[waxcylinder]

As Steve says - and also curiously someone has very recently posted a tutorila in teh Wiki on recording church services - you may wabt to read this: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Recor ... h_Services

WC