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Recording the Audio This process will record your commentary track, either from a Laser Disc Player, Microphone or Standalone DVD player, onto your computer as a .wav file The main requirement for this is to have a Sound Card with some sort of input options. Check the instructions that came with your soundcard to identify this input. If you are recording your own personal commentary track, then you can plug your microphone directly into the microphone input. If you are recording from a standalone LD or DVD player, then you will probably need some RCA -> mini jack cables to hook up your LD output into your Soudncard's input. You might need to go to your local Radio Shack to find this cable, but most computers nowadays have a soundcard with a mini stereo microphone input. If you have a higher end soundcard with digital in and/or RCA inputs, by all means, use those as they will provide a higher quality signal. The next major requirement is that you have some sort of audio recording software. Your soundcard probably came with some. SoundForge by Sonic Foundry (www.sonicfoundry.com) is an excellent piece of retail software, and will help you to make a high quality recording. The other major requirement is hard drive space. Recording a CD quality .wav file that's 2 hours long will require approximately 1-gig of hard drive space. If you are short on hard drive space, you should do just a few chapters at a time, convert them to mp3, delete the large .wav files and then do a couple more chapters until you've completed the film The basic process is to:
There is some recording software that will allow you to split your recording into separate tracks on the fly. One example is Rosoft Audio Recorder that is made for recording LPs to your hard drive, so it should work nicely. It's home page also has troubleshooting and tips for using your soundcard and is available Here. Another example is Audiotools which is available here (it's a 3+ meg shareware download) There is a small (105k) Freeware app called Fat Rock Studio available here that is a multitrack recorder and should work just fine. There are some
programs that will encode to mp3 on the fly, although I know that some
programs like that end up producing poor quality mp3s. Test them out
and if they sound crappy, record as a .wav and then convert to mp3 with
LAME Okay,
now onto Converting into mp3 with winLame |