Hi,

Would really appreciate some help on what quality to use while recording speech...

I'm involved in recording lectures that are to be later burnt onto cd's and made available to students at my institute.

I use an IBM (well Lenovo) R51 celeron thinkpad with soundmax (AC'97 compatible) audio. Given that it has only 40GB HDD, space is an issue since lectures are conducted every week. I'm also using a collar mic (condenser with external battery power source).

I currently record with audacity 1.2.4 at 44.1 KHz with 16 bit samples but am unsure if i should be recording at a higher setting.

Should I be recording at 48 KHz instead? Would a usb mic be recommended over the AC'97 mic port?

Also, would love some advice on the best possible way to distribute these lectures - audio cd's would work out too expensive and I'm unsure of the legality of lame encoded mp3's. On the flip side, not many students would be able to install media player ogg codecs/ foobar on their machine...

many thanks in advance!

I record a lot of lectures, and I use a lower setting for WAVs: 22,050Hz - 16bit - mono
The WAVs can then be dumped to CD "as is".

To convert the WAV to MP3, I use LAME: -V3 --vbr-new --lowpass 8
This results in an MP3 file that is ~48kbps with a lowpass filter @ 8kHz (fine for spoken word, IMO).


http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=35214

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=36879


:edt: links

Many thanks - this setting gives me nice sounding audio with low file sizes.

I think export mp3 from audacity always produces stereo files (I believe I saw a discussion to that effect somewhere on hydrogen audio)

Funnily enough works well when my input file is a signed 16 bit pcm wav (exported from audacity)

but when I use a signed 16 bit AU (again exported from audacity), the output mp3 turns all squeaky...

Many thanks - this setting gives me nice sounding audio with low file sizes.

I think export mp3 from audacity always produces stereo files (I believe I saw a discussion to that effect somewhere on hydrogen audio)

Funnily enough works well when my input file is a signed 16 bit pcm wav (exported from audacity)

but when I use a signed 16 bit AU (again exported from audacity), the output mp3 turns all squeaky...