Create Your Own Music CDs

Get It On: Moving Audio Onto Your PC

1. A source player (tape deck or turntable).
   
   
2. A sound card or external sound device, connected to the source player through the audio-in jack.
   
   
3. Cables. For source players with two RC audio-out jacks, get a sub-$5 Y-splitter cable, available from many electronics stores.
   
   
4. Audio software. We recommend downloading Syntrillium Software's Cool Edit 96.
   
   
5. Disk space--lots of it. A 4-minute pop song in .wav file format takes up to 40MB.
   
   

You're in love with your old cassette tapes and vinyl records, but playing them is scary: You live in fear of hungry cassette decks chewing up favorite tunes and skidding styli scratching a new beat into the grooves of your old 45s.

Step one in preserving these artifacts is getting their contents onto your PC's hard drive. This isn't quite as simple as pressing a tape deck's Record button, but it's not far off. The big difference is that you'll probably want to record tracks one at a time to create a single .wav file for each track. Depending on your PC's RAM and CPU speed, it is possible to record the whole side of an LP in one go--I pulled off 20 minutes of songs in a single session on my cheap 200-MHz Cyrix PC (with 64MB of memory) without a hitch. But it was a drag to split up the tracks later on.

However, if the sound quality is especially bad, you may want to keep tracks together in a single file to process out the background noise in one go. For more on this part of the process, see "Master Your Digital Domain: Removing Imperfections."

The first step is to hook up your source deck to your PC's sound card. You'll probably need a Y-shaped cable that converts the red-and-white stereo RC jacks on the back of most stereos into a minijack for your sound card's audio-in socket--these cost less than $5 at electronics stores. You'll also need recording software (forget Windows Sound Recorder--it's too limited). We recommend Syntrillium Software's Cool Edit 96--the downloadable trial version is ideal for this task.

If your sound card is a cheapie that produces poor audio quality, consider the $299 USB SonicPort recording device from Opcode. This easy-to-install Plug-and-Play device converts your analog recordings to digital audio without help from your sound card or CPU, and doesn't degrade sound quality.

When you start Cool Edit 96, be sure to enable the Save function; the unregistered trial version lets you pick only two usable function sets per session. Then create a new file (select File, New) and set its properties to Stereo, 16-Bit, and a sample rate of 44100--the same level as CD audio. Cue up the track you want to record and click Cool Edit's Record button. Then start playing the track.

When you're recording or processing sound, quit all your other computing tasks--including background ones. You don't want some CPU-intensive task interrupting your session, because the music goes on even when your CPU's busy, so you'll lose either sound quality or actual music in the process. (Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and kill all but the crucial system tasks such as Systray and Explorer.)

When your tune's finished, stop recording and save the file (select File, Save). Congratulations! Your music is now digitized and archived. Now it's time to clean up the sound.