[geeks] Audio Recording

[Phil Stracchino]

On 01/24/11 15:15, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> The problem is that PC sound cards stink. They are built for playing sound to
> small speakers, chatting with $1 condenser microphones and recording old
> tapes to low bitrate MP3s.

The problem is that *the majority of inexpensive PC sound cards and
onboard sound chipsets* stink.  There are some extremely good ones out
there.  The EMU10K/EMU10K1 chipset is one to look for; it's capable of
96KHz, 24-bit audio.

> I think the only compression available for general use is MP3. Most portable
> devices only decode MP3 files, although there are plenty that decode the 
> MP4 audio compression, also known as AAC. 

It should be noted that a good MP3 encoder such as LAME, with
appropriate settings, can be very good indeed, at the cost of a larger
usage of disk space, while still producing output several times smaller
than the raw PCM audio files.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
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         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.