PRC Recording Studio PRC Recording Studio PRC Recording Studio
Genealogy of my kin

This page will contain information about music, both listening to professionally created music, and making my own.

Recording music is done at PRC Records.

I now use Cakewalk's Sonar software to record music. General DAW tip page. In fact, I use it so much that I'm hosting the cakewalk.audio FAQ on this website.
       

Tubes

Way back in the 60s, I was convinced that tubes were dead.A Boy was I wrong. Some tube related links:

Reasonable Cable

Audiophiles spend insane amounts of money on cables, hundreds of dollars for a wire three feet long is not unusual.

Headphone amps

I'm not a big fan of headphones, I like Speakers, but sometimes you can't make that much noise, so you should check out http://www.headamp.com/

Killing the CD player project

My 2004 New Years Resolution was to kill off all audio CD players for listening to music. The Kill-the-CD project pages. I have written some "Open Source" software to help manage your music collection using a Slim Devices SqueezeBox. Here is more information on my Open Source Squeezebox support software. And some assorted notes on software to rip and compress your collection

Other music software.

Recording music is fun, but a little overwhelming. Some background reading is a must. A good place to start is John Borwick Sound Recording Practices, Oxford Press, NY, NY. 1996

Articles on the web that have helped me include:

A great article on the wildly common large diameter condenser mics was published in the January 2002 issue of Recording. Since it isn't yet online, I've scanned it in here. Making Mics Better: a Practical DIY Project, by Scott Dorsey. I assume that Recording will have it online soon.

Ripping, extracting, encoding and playing music.

The process of pulling music from a CD and putting it onto your compter is generically called "ripping." This usually means taking a CD and turning it into a MP3, altho it could be a DVD, and you could convert it to a .wav, .wma, or a .flac as well.

The coolest software I've used in this area is FLAC compression. It is lossless. Cool players such as WinAmp have FLAC plugins, so you can play directly from the compressed file: all the convience of a MP3 with real quality. You have to download and install

the FLAC compressor separately from the user friendly GUI. http://home.wanadoo.nl/~w.speek/download/FLAC_frontend.zip

Flac requires a separate process to pull the audio off of the CD. So the standard low cost program is ExactAudioCopy, but I like CDex better.

For MP3s, you want LAME. Search for LAME executable bundles. In early 2004, you want version 3.90 of LAME. Possible sites for LAME include:

  • http://mitiok.cjb.net/
  • http://www.hot.ee/smpman/mp3

Good info on MP3 tools at http://www.mp3-tech.org/

Stores that I frequent

Copyright © 2004-2005 Farrell and Associates.