i hope this is the place for this discussion. anyway here goes. i recently won, via an auction, an unopened, unplayed cassette tape of the Ninja Turtles: Coming Out Of Their Shells. for anyone who doesn't remember 1990, Pizza Hut gave these away for like $5 or with a family meal at the dine-in restaurants. i got one in '90, but like anyone else, especially a kid, i played the sh*t out of it and eventually the tape became lost. i don't know where it ended up, but the quality after a million play's would not be suitable for recording.

anyway, i got this new tape now. i have decent audio equipment, for this purpose anyway: a JVC TD-W318 deck (like $250 in 1997 when i got it), and a Santa Cruz card on the PC. This soundcard is adequate, probably more than necessary for recording a tape: s/n of more than 90dB, max resolution of 20-bits/48KHz. I used SoundForge with 24-bit/48KHz and recorded the first run to wav. I set the peaks using a poor recording made years ago, where the peaks on that tape were way over 0 (around +6dB!) i lowered the input level for that +6dB signal to hit just around -3. so the TMNT tape ended up peaking around -6dB.

my problem comes in here. i've split up the tracks with SF and have saved them to 16-bit/44.1KHz files. i cropped the files so only sections of >-50dB were left, normalized the tracks ("Normalize using: Average RMS power (loudness); Normalize to: whatever let the peaks just hit 0 without being under or going over; Scan Settins: Ignore Below -Inf.; Attack/Release Time: 1ms; Use equal loudness contour: checked; If clipping occurs: Stop Processing.), and set the resolution to 44.1KHz and set the bits to 16. these tracks sound awesome, but i know i didn't use 'pro' settings, i just did what sounded good to me. i want to know, what are the best settings to down-mix these tracks? if you have and use SF, please help me understand these things (my choices are in bold):

Resample:
Interpolation accuracy (1 to 4)
Apply an anti-alias filter during resample checked for me
Bit-Depth Converter:
Dither: None, Rectangular (1 bit peak-to-peak), Rectangular (2 bits peak-to-peak), Triangular (2 bits peak-to-peak), Highpass Triangular, Gaussian (2 bits RMS-to-RMS)
Noise shaping: High-pass Contour, Equal Loudness Contour

thanks in advance

The only thing different that I use is for Interpolation, I have it set to 3

any particular reason for using '3' instead of '4'?

Some I read somewhere (maybe the helpfile or manual???). Haven't changed it since.

Hi, hope this is the right topic for this.
Just a few basic questions:
I have a shity Realtek ALC 650 soundcard, and I want to record (to wav file) a few cassettes (from a Sony deck). Now my question is what would be the best bitrate and samplerate for recording (for best quality) for this card? Note: I would also like to write the recorded wav file to CD as well.
So is it a good idea to use say a 176.4 or 192 or whatever sampelrate and 24 or more bits and then dither and downsample, or sholud I use plain 16 bits and 44.1 samplerate?
Oh and I have no clue as to what bitrates and samplerates the realtek supports properly, i guess it only supperts 24 bits and whatnot because of kmixer and that is evil right?