I hope you understand my english, here it goes.

In this weekend I plan to record a radio show in my PC, using the line/in port and a philips stereo system. The question is: what should I do the achieve the BEST quality at doing this? Software and stuff? I'm at audacity or cooledit pro for recording(have oth installed), and I would like to know the proper configuration to record flawlessly. I have a big hard disk, so I'm not concerned about memory.

I've been searching the forum for some time I havent find what I was looking for, so I hope you can help me with this issue.

If you have a soundcard which resamples, like an Audigy, record at 48 khz, then downsample. Otherwise use 44.1. Of course, if you have a high quality soundcard capable of recording at 24/96, and you want to burn a DVD-Audio disc, you could do that too.

I would record with Cool Edit in 32-bit float mode. This gives you some freedom to do a little editing with the audio after you record. You still have to be careful not to introduce clipping, though. Adjust levels so that peaks hit around -6 db. If nothing peaks much higher than that when you're done recording, you might want to normalize the recording. Then dither with noise shaping down to whatever final bitdepth you want.

Of course, the quality of your radio reception will affect the recording much more than any of these above factors.

Thanks for replying.

I forgot to mention my equipment. It's an asus's A7V8X-X onboard card.


True. I cant change the radio reception, but I can try to record as best as I can the signal to my pc. I cant change the radio signal, so I'm not concerned about it, just want to try to achieve a good recording with THAT signal.

Does windows xp have some kind of GB single file limitations? The show is going to be 9h long (even more), and I plan to record everything in a single file for posterior editing (fade in, fade out, tracks and such) and possible lossless conversion.

Thanks again.

If you use NTFS, maximum filesize is limited only by your harddrive size. Maximum file sizes for FAT16/32 is 2 GB and 4 GB respectively.

Info.

Many programs don't handle files bigger than 4 GB.

If you are looking for quality, you had better spending some time tuning the antenna than the PC. It should account for 95 % of the quality of your final recording.

Thanks for the NTFs info, it cleared my mind a bit.

I found some line-in recorders that could record directly to flac, and I was planning to use it (like LiveinCode). Do you know if these programs have this limitation? If so, do you suggest other ones (like Soundforge)?


I was wondering, why not just record to 16bits? Isn't flac going to get problems when trying to encode these files?

Recording from radio you shouldn't use more than 32 Khz sampling rate. FM has a lowpass of about 15 Khz or so.

As for software, i would try Messer. Quite a versatile tool for this purpose.

As I said, you'll need to dither and noiseshape down to 16 bits to get the finished product. Recording in 32 bit allows for more accurate editing of the waveform (for example, if you want to normalize it).


I suppose if it's just going to be used on the computer, 32 kHz would be ok. However, if anything on the disc is going to be burned to CD, you're going to need to upsample then anyway. Might as well use 44.1 then, since as he said, space is not an issue.

Also, if it's FM being recorded, recording at 44.1 or higher will allow you to see the 19 kHz stereo pilot tone, letting others know it's sourced from FM broadcast and not a 16 kHz lowpassed mp3.

Thanks for all the info. I think its all I need for now.

@CiTay - Hey, this program looks really neat. I'm going to give it a try.

Another question.

I have the show in my hd, and I want to know what kind of filters I should use to reamaster the recording.

The recording got some kind of static sound (some tsssss), but it's from the original signal and impossible to avoid, since it was a problem from the station.

Is a hiss reduction recomended?

In Audacity you can use their noise reduction thing... Just select a few seconds of silence + the noise, get your "noise profile", and then apply either the smallest, or the second smallest noise reduction settings to the entire file.

The noise reduction reduces the quality a lot with other artifacts, so try to keep it to a minimum if at all possible.