[78-L] Recording (and processing somewhat) software on the cheap.

[Doug Duncan]

I do some occasional transfers of 78s to CD for my own use but I could 
not justify the expense of Dcart . So I would like to give a plug for 
Audacity which is a freeware alternative that lets anyone experiment 
with capturing music to a PC with even quite basic sound capability. In 
addition to the standard recording, editing for length and playback 
functions the software can analyse the recording to identify whether 
clipping has occurred in the capture process so that you know to lower 
your input level. The package displays the recorded waveforms to help 
you apply fixes only to the areas that require it. You can also, 
separately, download a suite of plug-ins that allow for normalising the 
recorded level, adjust equalisation etc. Then there are also functions 
like click removal and noise removal that are adjustable to minimise the 
undesirable impact on the music.

Whilst I have no experience of the expensive packages that are around 
and so can't compare, for me this has the benefit that it is free, easy 
to use and gives results that are good enough for my personal use with 
noise reduction and de-clicking that do not destroy the content but 
reduce the noise to an acceptable level.

I run Audacity on a old 360 Mhz Pentium2 thinkpad laptop with 192 Mb of 
memory under XP but there are versions available for Linux and Mac OSX. 
I believe it is also supplied with some of the USB turntables that have 
been discussed,

You can get it from
http://audacity.soundforge.net/

and the plug-ins from the same download site.

As always, the standard disclaimers apply. I don't have any connection 
to Audacity other than as a user and if you cause the end of the world I 
accept no responsibility.

regards,

Doug