AudioA2D

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Digital audio from Analog sources Preserving music / audio from Cassette, LP record, VCR audio, et. al.

--eagleheart 22:45, 13 Jan 2005 (EST)

A simple description which I view as a starting point for something ultimately more detailed
and useful. Most certainly welcoming additions, corrections, enhancements, etc. ;^)
This write-up relies upon KDE tools but there are certainly other approaches.

Contents

Creating WAV files

Wiring

  • Grab a 3.5mm-to-RCA stereo adaptor cable. About $1 from your favorite electronics retailer.
  • Red and white plugs in Line Out of your legacy device; other end to the blue Audio In of your sound card (but you knew that, right?).

Kmix

  • Initially Kmix will show up as an icon on your taskbar. Right click and select Show Mixer Window.
  • Make sure the Line (In) volume is activated. About 2/3 of the way up is a good start. Tweak at will.
  • Move the IGain volume up, to perhaps 1/3. Again, adjust as necessary.

Krecord

  • If you wish, select Options-> 'Freq spectrum...' and 'Input Level...' monitors.
  • File ->"New memory buffer". (File->“Delete buffer” first if necessary.)

Ready to Record.

  • Start your legacy audio device.
  • Verify that you have sound coming thru (line out of your sound card to speakers, and /or freq spectrum display).
  • Position to start and pause.
  • Krecord: Start recording by clicking the red "record" button. Start (unpause) legacy device. You might have a root console separately running `watch -d free` (or `nice -n 19 top`) to monitor your free RAM. You want to avoid going over into swap (virtual memory).
  • When finished with the immediate session in krecord:
    • click the square grey stop button.
    • File->”Save buffer as...”: Create a .wav file.
  • Check your work with XMMS or any other good audio player.

Creating (pc-independent) playable cd's from WAV

kernel < 2.6 requiring SCSI cd drives or SCSI-emulated ATAPI drives

  • Move or Copy all targeted .wav files to a dedicated directory.
  • (CLI) $ cdrecord -scanbus
    to identify your writer's “channel,id,lun(logical unit number)”. Below it's 0,0,0.
  • (CLI) $ cdrecord -v -eject speed=0 dev=0,0,0 driveropts=burnfree -audio -pad /path-to-wavs/*.wav

kernel 2.6.x

  • (CLI) $ cdrecord -v -eject speed=0 dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 driveropts=burnfree
    could someone confirm this and also whether udev needs to be active / properly configured? Thanks

Simple editing with audacity

  • Start program audacity. You may want to enable a 'safe setting' regarding your .wav source in File->Preferences->File Formats->"Make a copy of the file before editing".
  • File->Open...(select .wav). It will take several seconds to import depending on the size.
  • Play to review.
  • Left Click and Drag to select the section you want to export.
  • Export Selection to .wav, or to ogg vorbis / mp3 (see below).

Writing Digital Music Player files with audacity

(Note: you could transfer the .wav file to a digital audio device - well, iPod can handle 
.wav - but .wav files are relatively huge compared to compressed formats. Other reasons for 
choosing ogg/mp3 vs .wav ...??)
  • Open .wav file with audacity.
  • If necessary, select portion for export (see "Simple Editing...", above).
  • Choose export [selection] to ogg or mp3.
  • If you choose mp3 it will prompt you the first time for the location of libmp3lame.so.
    • If you don't have it you can download the source tarball from
      http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=290
    • (CLI) $ ./configure [--prefix=/usr]
      ...or another prefix of your choosing if you don't want the default of /usr/local.
    • there are some options in configure for a GTK frame analyzer and other stuff but they aren't needed for your task above.
    • (CLI) $ make; make install
      ...may need to be root for latter.
  • Again, if exporting mp3, it will prompt you to enter the ID3 tags: Choose 1 of ID3v1 / ID3v2. ID3v1 is called "more compatible".
  • As before, check your work with a (desktop) audio player.
  • Transfer to iPod or other Digital Music Player. Rio and Samsung have models that support ogg vorbis. I'm sure there are others.

Writing Digital Music Player files with glame

TBD

Useful References

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/MP3-HOWTO.html   Well written, detailed. Last updated Dec 2001 but 
still very relevant. 
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/MP3-CD-Burning/index.html   Actually MP3 to WAV to cd, Some finer points
concerning cd preparation, using disk-at-once method, etc. 
http://www.alsa-project.org/
http://www.djcj.org/LAU/guide/index.php  this link appears on the alsa main page but is worth mentioning
 by itself.   
http://plus24.com/mp3-howto/  last updated 2001

Testing Specs

Compaq Presario, Athlon 1.67Ghz
512Mb RAM
'soundcard' used was an on-board VIA VT8233/A/8235 chip. A real card - Soundblaster or whatever - is recommended for quality encoding.
SUSE Linux 9.0
kernel 2.4.21
KDE 3.1.4
alsa 0.9.6-96, (SUSE binary rpm)
KMix 1.91
KRecord 1.15
audacity 1.2.0 (SUSE binary rpm. Current (Dec-2004) stable version is 1.2.3)

This page has been accessed 1406 times. This page was last modified 22:47, 13 Jan 2005.

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