"Stephen Cheung" wrote in message
om
Hi all,

I am new to this group and have a few questions regarding recording my
own piano CD using my computer.

It is actually my dad, who have played the piano for 40 years, wants
to produce some CD as presents to his friends. Last night I tried to
use my computer to record his performance. Quality is acceptable, but
I have a few questions:

1) I used only a very cheap microphone to do the recording and it is
connected to the "mic" input of the sound card. The recorded sound
always seems too low unless I amplify it using a sound software. Is
there any other good way to do this?

The *right* way to do this is to use a good microphone and a good mic preamp
and use the line level inputs of a good sound card.

Here's the cheapest good microphone for piano recording that I can
recommend:

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/srs7/...02977795/g=hom
e/search/detail/base_id/43297

You can hear a recording made with this mic under the top of a grand piano
at

http://www.pcavtech.com/test_data/fa...s-mix02-cd.wav

Slow download, not the best playing, but its a sample of what can be done.

You'll need mic stand(s) as well, probably boom stands if you want to mic
inside the piano. These are reasonably inexpensive.

A common means that is used to obtain cheap but decent mic preamps is to us
a small recording console. Here is cheapest recording console for piano
recording that I can recommend:

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/srs7/...02977795/g=liv
e/s=mixers/search/detail/base_pid/631237/


2) Should I borrow a Mini Disc recorder from my friends to do the
recording, and transfer the data into the computer later? How to do
this? How is the sound quality?

Minidisc recording isn't bad, but it is lossy compression which limits sound
quality and also can produce undesirable interactions if you later try to
encode your recordings as MP3s.

3) After the recording, I would need to save the file. The software
allows me to save in too many formats, and I don't know which one
should be using if I were to put it on to a CD and let most CD players
to play them. Should I save it in wav format?

Yes, use .wav format.

Which wav format is
right (there are 8 or 10 wav formats!!)

44,100 Hz sampling, 16 bit samples, two channels.

I only tried to save them as
mp3, since that is the only format the CD burning software would
recognise to convert into CD audio. I tried a few wav format but the
CD software ("Ahead Nero", actually) couldn't recognise them at all.

Nero loves to record .wav files with 44,100 Hz sampling, 16 bit samples, and
two channels.

4) Further to question 3, the first experimental CD I made could only
be played in my mini-hi-fi that has specified as "CD/RW playback". How
can I make it so that it could be played in even normal CD players?

Use CD-R blanks. Most but not all regular CD players play CD-Rs just fine.