Audacity Forum

I've been doing speech recording for about 8 months. No experience before that, so I'm still very much new. My no-frills setup is an SM58 clone mic XLR'd into a Kustom KMP4080 amp, and out to a couple of Kustom speakers for room audio. To record, a mono cable goes from the 1/4" output jack on the back of the amp into the Mic input minijack on a rebuilt HP/Compaq laptop with Windows XP SP3. Up until a few weeks ago, I was using Audacity 1.2.6 and exporting the file as an MP3. The audio on the recordings isn't great, but I'm told that's to be expected from an internal sound card on a laptop.

I posted a few questions in this forum, and was advised to install Audacity 1.3.13, which I did. I also learned about a software product called the Levelator, which has helped out enormously. But Levelator only works with uncompressed files, so last recording session, instead of exporting an mp3 file, I exported a WAV, which became input to Levelator, which also outputs a WAV.

But that's where I hit a snag. When I drag & drop either of the two WAV files into Windows Media Player to burn a CD, they don't work. WMP displays a red X across from the file name, and the little slider guage that shows how much of the disk will be recorded on doesn't move. No error message. There doesn't seem to be any options in WMP to enable/disable filetypes for burning. When I tell WMP to check for updates, it says it is the most recent version (V 11).

To make matters even more confusing, if I copy either WAV to a thumb drive and pop it into my almost new desktop machine running Win 7, the WMP (V 12) on it has no trouble burning a disc.

I know that this is more likely to be a Windows/WMP problem, but I'm hoping someone can suggest what I should try next to resolve this. Thanks in advance for any advice/suggestions.


Related question: In order to get a cleaner (less noise) recording, it seems like I will need an external sound card/splitter device that would let me route the mic through to the amplifier with no latency, and also feed the sound signal into the laptop via a USB connection. I don't care about latency going to the laptop, I just want a cleaner recording than I'm getting now. Bearing in mind I've got almost no budget for this, are there any least-expensive external sound card/splitter devices I can be looking at and daydreaming about?

Thanks again...

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Bearing in mind I've got almost no budget for this, are there any least-expensive external sound card/splitter devices I can be looking at and daydreaming about?

Probably the Behringer UCA202. You can get cheaper USB soundcards, but most USB soundcards only have mic-in and line/headphone-out like a laptop.


I don't use WMP for burning, but I'll take a guess... It might be the sample rate & bit depth. CDs are 44.1kHz, 16-bit stereo. I think most CD burning software will convert the format for you, but it might work better if you feed-in the correct format. Also, your files can't be too big... I assume your files are less than about 70 minutes playing time? (Personally, I use ImgBurn (FREE!!!), and I always feed in 44.1/16 stereo WAV files.)

You can sometimes use Windows to tell you about the music file. Right-click > Properties > Advanced. I'm not on a Windows machine, but I think it should tell you the music specifications. 44100, 16-bit, Stereo is the Music CD sound specification. If you export one of those, it should open up on all three computers platforms and burn very well.

There are some interesting problems with recordings that are too long. The maximum WAV file size can be as low as 2GB, and the maximum show length on a music CD is 78 minutes (it says 80 on the case). If you exceed either one of those numbers, a CD show may fail.

Koz

Try and download, play and burn this file.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/piano2.wav

It's very short and it's video sound specification, not Audio CD, but it should burn anyway.

Koz

The same trouble happened again during last night's recording session. Afterwards, a friend noticed the WAV file exported from Audacity showed a Length attribute of zero in the Properties display. Today I found the cause of the problem. It's documented in the "How To Burn" tutorial (http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/How_to_burn_CDs):

"Note: Windows Media Player 11 will not accept WAV files for burning if they are dragged straight into a burn list without having previously been played in Media Player. You will see a red symbol and a "length of file cannot be determined" error. To solve this problem, drag the file into the Media Player Library or into a playlist, then from there into a burn list. Also, this version of Media Player cannot burn AIFF files, so you must export from Audacity as WAV. Neither of these problems affect previous versions of Media Player."

The only difference is in my case, I did NOT get a "length of file cannot be determined" error message. Just now, I duplicated the condition and then drag/dropped the sample file into the Player section of WMP. That seems to reset the Length attribute to a true value, and the file subsequently can be dragged into the Burn list.

It's nice to have a workaround, but is this a bug in Audacity? Or in Windows/WMP?

EDIT: Went ahead and ordered a Behringer UCA202.

Mekratrig wrote:but is this a bug in Audacity? Or in Windows/WMP?

My guess is WMP.
Try using a different (better) CD burning program such as CDBurnerXP (it's free and one of my favourite CD burners for Windows) http://cdburnerxp.se/