In article ,
Glenn Richards wrote:
wrote:
My middle-aged PC (Athlon 700 / 256Mb / 30 Gig) has no sound card and I
want to buy one. I also want to transfer some of my favourite vinyl to
CD. Can I do this with a basic soundcard + software or would I do
better to buy a more advanced soundcard maybe with its associated
software?
Sound card - pretty much anything if you just want to get pings and
chimes when you get new emails.
Eh? A sound card has little to do with the computer's internally generated
SFX. It's for digitising external analogue audio, or accepting digital
audio via a conventional digital audio port. It should also give you a
high quality sound output separate to and not including the computer's SFX
audio buss.
If you want higher quality go for a USB external sound card such as
Creative Extigy. This keeps sensitive audio circuits away from
electrically "noisy" PC hardware.
A carefully designed internal card can give satisfactory results.
Vinyl to CD... there's several ways of doing this, but the best one is
to hook your turntable (via a phono pre-amp) to a standalone CD recorder
and record onto a rewritable audio CD. Then extract the recording using
EAC, cdparanoia etc and load it into the appropriate software to clean
it up.
What a long winded way to do things.
The Wave editor that comes with the full version of Nero Burning ROM has
a very good noise reduction and declicker filter, and I've had very good
results from this when transferring vinyl using the method above.
If you're going to use such software the quality of the sound card becomes
pretty meaningless.
--
*Could it be that "I do " is the longest sentence? *
Dave Plowman
London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.