Latest Articles by Raji

Turn Your Home PC into a Complete Recording Studio

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0600

Want to turn your home PC into a complete Recording studio to record, edit, and play back digital audio files, this article, describes how and what you need do it.

Do you possess a multimedia PC with a sound card and speaker? All you require is an inexpensive recording and editing software to your PC, with this you can produce high-quality, effective voice and music recordings. The basic prerequisite to get a level of recording are a PC, Quiet recording space, Microphone, Speakers and headphones, recording software.

Our aim is to record a clear, close voice track, so we need a Quiet recording space, which means keeping noise and the sound of the room out of the reach till the finished recording meets all our needs. Professional’s records in closet specially designed to keep noises out and make their voice sound good.

To get your voice or recordings into the computer, you need a microphone. Don't relay on the dull one that you got with your computer. Choose high-quality, inexpensive Microphone that sounds far better. Microphones are available from music or audio equipment suppliers. There are microphones for the basic voice work. Choose the microphone that best suits for female voice and male voice.

Choosing of computer speakers tends to be given importance because it impacts on getting quality output of recording. Computer speakers are adequate for recording, editing, and finishing basic recordings, but empower some decent powered speakers to get better quality output.

The net result you get in recording apparently depends on the Recording software that is being used. Choose recording software equipped with all editing features such as with best bit rate, creating special effects adding music and/or sound effects and the software should present your recordings in the formats you desire. The music software that best suits for professionals as well as beginners are FlexiMusic’s FlexiMusic Wave Editor, a software for recording and editing.

Part 1: Getting Started
Fasten up your equipment by plugging your microphone into your sound card's microphone. Be careful in this, since there are three plugs there, choose the one that Is written as “Mic”. Now launch the software that controls the sound card’s recording source (for this you can use the “Recording source” command in FlexiMusic Wave Editor). Then select your recording source (Mic) and adjust its volume at 100%.

Start your recording program (say FlexiMusic Wave Editor), choose stereo, bit rates of 16 bits, 44kHz of sampling rate and at CD-quality. Start the recording command. Adjust the volume so that Digital level meters shows 3/4th volume, if it exceeds it will sound horribly distorted.

To improve the sound of your recordings, get closer to the mic. The farther away you are from it, the more you pick up the room noise around you. Get closer and your voice is closer. Advantage of getting closer to microphone may bring out the lower frequencies in your voice and can make you sound more powerful. Obviously, locate your recording area away from noisy equipment. Some precautionary things that are to be taken care are, put a little distance between the mic and the noise source. Avoid salty foods immediately before your recording session. Have some water nearby and apply a little lip balm. These will keep your mouth and lips lubricated. When you're ready to record, speak clearly and slowly. You can always tense up your recording while editing. If an error occurs go back to the nearest sentence start and continue on again.

Part 2: Editing the recordings
“As haste makes waste”, don’t fix everything in one take. Record as many times as needed and assemble the best parts into the final recording. Calculate whether the recording done has everything that you desired. If not, don’t pamper, go back and re-record the bits you need, listen again, and repeat the process until you obtain the desired. You see a two-dimensional representation of the words as sound waveforms. You can hear the words as you play them. Cut, copy, paste is all the techniques you apply when editing sound.

Early to begin editing, make sure to turn off the mic, disconnect the headphones, and switch off speakers. Delete the unnecessary things that interrupt the output of the recording. Eliminate the junk and move further improving your performance. Never give up to until you get the best result of recording. Do carry out as many takes as needed, find the best takes out of it and build your final version from them.

Make sure of any changes you have done during editing. Analyze, if you can make it better. Check whether the volume is consistent? Are there any noises, background sounds, or other unwanted junk parts that which can be eliminated or reduce?

After editing the voice, to make it efficient better you can add music or sound effects to enhance the final version. You add the back ground effect using the same software FlexiMusic Wave Editor, open the music file in audio software, select, and copy it to the clipboard. If needed trim the music to match the length of your voice recording, then, place the cursor at the start of your voice recording, and select Edit > Paste Mix. Make sure that you can hear your voice recording clearly with the music playing in the background.

Now make the best use of your audio software's to maximize the recording's volume. Next, choose a format in which you want your recordings to be such as, Mp3, WMA, Snd, Raw, and Au. Select the recording which is in the waveform and save the file to the audio format of your choice. Using mp3 or WMA files is useful to save space on your hard drive while retaining reasonably good quality and for transmitting your work over the Internet.

Finally you have done! You can play back the file in FlexiMusic Wave Editor, or with any audio program, such as Windows Media Player or Winamp, and transliterate the recording.

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The author is a passionate internet user. He is fond of all kinds of music,
more enthusiastic in learning and programming music related software. To know
about the author please visit http://www.fleximusic.com/

http://www.fleximusic.com/waveditor/overview.htm

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

The Role of Computers In Editing Music

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The bloom of computers is so enormous that, computers not only dominate the field of Information Technology but it has started to stretch its wings in the field of arts and entertainment that too especially in the field of music.

Music is an art, entertainment, a human activity that involves the organization of sounds with some degree of rhythm, melody, and harmony. Are you one among the people, who loves music to the core and wish to compose and edit music of your own. You need not go in search of recording theatres to get your work done. You can avail all your desired works in music by sitting at home. With designed music software you can compose and edit music of your choice just with your PC and creativity.

Now a days, programmed music software’s are in the market which renders all your requirements to compose and edit music. Some of the music editing software are Goldwave, FlexiMusic and Cool Edit Pro.

Goldwave and Cool Edit Pro are meant for professionals. GoldWave is the most advanced audio editor available in its price range. It includes all of the common audio editing commands and effects, it has tools such as a batch processor/converter, a CD reader, and audio restoration filters.

FlexiMusic Wave Editor is an easy-to-use audio editor for professionals and home users (for Windows). It provides a powerful and user-friendly editing environment for novice users. Anyone (with a PC) who needs to edit, convert features necessary to edit music. The features are record, Cut and copy, delete, trim, paste-replace, paste-insert, and paste multiple insert (looping). Additional editing operations are paste, equalize, echo, noise reduction, modulate, and stretch/shrink. Transform operations like Reverse, invert, move-up/down, move-forward/backward, inter-change channels, channel mix etc. is in use to manipulate/modify the sound. FlexiMusic Wave Editor offers the best value in audio editing software. It's like having thousands of dollars' worth of professional audio equipment all in one easy-to-use software package.

Cool Edit is a digital sound editor which gives you a wide variety of special effects to "touch up" your sounds: reverberation, noise reduction, echo and many others. Can Edit and master audio with professional digital tools. Analyze audio with Spectral View and Frequency Analysis.

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The author is a passionate internet user. He is fond of all kinds of music, more enthusiastic in learning and programming music related software. http://www.fleximusic.com This site is one among the favorites of the author.
http://www.fleximusic.com/waveditor/overview.htm

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Effective Digital Recording

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Digital recording promises to be the technology which helps us to get rid of the tiresome work of recording long conversations / interviews on tapes and to no longer burdened with boxes and boxes of 90-minute tapes. Now you can record interviews right onto your computer or your laptop. We can now process our interview recordings / conversations digitally, by adding effects, mixing, and so on, plus edit to literally dozens of "generations" without any loss of quality.

One fine morning, I had to record a telephonic conversation over tape- recorder. I feel this work to be a cumbersome and I wanted to get off this brain eating problem. When I was about to connect my tape-recorder to my phone line, I was puzzled a bit and realized that the jack on the device that connects my tape recorder to the phone looked to be a perfect fit to the slot on my computer's multimedia sound card. I started connecting the unit into my sound card and it really worked and in no time and I was able to record the whole conversation digitally.

I was over-whelmed with joy that, digital recording has certainly made my job a lot easier and freed me from the burden of lots of boxes of 90-minute tapes. I bought a digital audio recorder, which would render all my works for recording.
Effective Recording with Digital Audio Recorder:
You can work on or record a long audio file up to 2GB size (for a 16 bit file). This will allow you to work on a file of 3 hours and 20 minutes duration in CD quality Stereo. When hard disk space is limited, it alerts us in advance and allows you to clear files to continue. You can load a complete CD's content into one file and edit it directly.
Digital Audio Recording overcomes the grind of conventional tape recording such as, play-type-rewind. Digitally recorded interviews are easy to transcribe and allows in slowing down the play back. Digitally recording the interviews are particularly valuable to Web journalists and other online writers. Digital recording allows the readers to hear the source for themselves. Prior to the conduct of the interview, you should ask for permission to hit the upload button to the person who appears for the interview.

To record the interviews, all you need is telephone-recording unit, a computer (PC) equipped with a sound card and an audio-editing program, such as FlexiMusic or Goldwave.

Part 1:

You connect your phone to your computer. Plug one end of the phone line into the recording control device and the other end to the telephone. Now plug the jack into your computer's sound card on the back of the computer. Your hardware is now ready to carry out your recordings.

Part 2:
Now it is the turn of installing your software program that records and saves your digital audio recording. There is a lot of editing software available in the market which fulfils all the requirements for effective recording. You can choose any program of your choice.
Presently, I use FlexiMusic Wave Editor; it is economic shareware and user- friendly software. It is free to use as a trail version. If desired, this can be purchased at an affordable price of $ 20.

After downloading and installing FlexiMusic Wave Editor you have to adjust the settings to get into your work.

To Start Up:

Once your hardware and software settings are made correct, you're ready to record the interviews. But before you start up, you'll need to create the file to save your recordings.

Run the FlexiMusic Wave Editor; Click the File menu, to choose New. On click to the New Menu, a dialog box (create new wave file) will open where you can select the sample rate, channels (stereo & mono) and the bit rate. You can choose the standard values such as sample rate (44100), channels (stereo) and bit rate (16 bit). Then click OK to set these standard values.

Now Recording:

Under the Tools menu, choose Record option or use the Record tool button (red disc), to Open the Record Audio dialogue box, this will pop up out to the FlexiMusic Wave Editor- Record Audio Window.

Recording window:
From the Recording window, select the source of your audio signal and set the volume for recording.

Windows Volume & Play Controls:
On clicking the Recording Source and Volume button, this will open up to the Windows Operating System recording control box. Here you can select the proper channel that is, the means through which you hear the audio such as Stereo mix / CD / Line in / Mixer / Aux / Microphone / Wave / or any other. Now click the Playing devices and volume button to adjust the output play volume of each channel separately.

After making sure of all settings, then back to the FlexiMusic Wave Editor- Record Audio Window, where you can find Start button to carry out recordings.

1) Now you are ready for recording, for instance, if the recording is through phone, a dial tone can be heard. Prior to an interview, it is better advisable to check the line and your recording program to make sure that everything is set right. Click the Start button on the Record Audio Window.
2) Things that are to be taken care prior to recording are,
Avoiding background noise, it's all around us . . . and it can spoil your recording from the start.

Choosing the Best Sampling Settings, when we work with sound on computers, we need to change it to a digital form. . I would suggest aiming at a sampling rate of 44100 Hz, because, the more samplings the computer records, the better the sound.
Adjust Volume Levels to Avoid Distortion; Keep an eye on your recording levels. You can observe the recording volume going up and down in the vertical white bars that which indicates the Recording Volume level. If you see the color in the bar constantly hitting the top, it indicates to reduce the volume if not your audio will be distorted. If you see the volume levels are too low - moving only at the bottom, then you will need to increase the volume. Simultaneously, you can watch the recording time too.

3) When your recording is completed, then again back to FlexiMusic Wave Editor- Record Audio Window, click the Stop Recording button. At any moment if you need to pause your recording, you can use "Pause" button. Once the recording is completed, click the Stop Recording button. If you are sure that your recordings are perfect, click on the "Done" button to finish the recording.

Save your Recordings:

As soon as the recording is completed, do save your recordings, for this click the File menu and choose Save. This will allow you to put the recorded file in a specific folder. Type the file name in the box against File Name. Consider using a name that which is much easier for you to figure out where the file is. Next, choose a format in which you your recordings to be such as, Mp3, WMA, Snd, Raw, Au.

Using mp3 or WMA files is useful to save space on your hard drive while retaining reasonably good quality and for transmitting your work over the Internet. It also saves lot of time in loading, processing, and converting your audio files.

MP3 Instructions:

For opening, editing, and save as Mp3 file you will need to install a separate command line Mp3 encoder/decoder. You can use LameWin32 encoder.

WMA Instructions:

For exporting to a .WMA file you need to install a separate command line. You can use Windows Media 8 Encoding Utility (it is a WMA command line encoder).

Finally you have done! You can play back the file in FlexiMusic, or with any audio program, such as Windows Media Player or Winamp, and transliterate the recording.

A forewarning:

Make sure that the person who faces the interview is well informed that the conversations are being taped because it is offensive to tape the conversation without the knowledge of others.

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The author is a passionate internet user. He is fond of all kinds of music,
more enthusiastic in learning and programming music related software. To know
about the author please visit http://www.fleximusic.com/

http://www.fleximusic.com/waveditor/overview.htm

Source: http://www.articletrader.com