How to record the recording

Connect the headphone jack of the tape drive with the line input of the computer sound card with a double-ended audio cable.

Play the tape

In computers, recorder software is used for recording.

But the effect is not very good.

There are detailed information below, hoping to help you.

Transcribing a magnetic tape into MP3 is a simple and complicated process. Simply put, take a pair of line outputs from a tape recorder and the line input from a sound card, find a suitable software to record and then compress it. To say complex means that there are many places to pay attention to in the process of re-recording. If a step goes wrong, it will affect the recording quality. Although I transcribed hundreds of tapes, few of them were satisfied after listening carefully. Now, at the request of my friends, I write down my own practices and experiences, and welcome your criticisms and suggestions.

Part I: Hardware preparation.

The hardware includes a computer and a tape recorder, as well as necessary connecting lines (usually 3.5/3.5 transfer lines).

computer

1. It is recommended to choose a PC with a main frequency above 300MHZ. If the main frequency is too low, it will increase the processing difficulty and slow down the processing speed. I don't think anyone wants to reduce noise for a song all night!

2. The sound card is better to be independent than the motherboard integrated sound card (of course, some motherboard integrated sound cards have good performance, and the recording effect is not worse than the independent sound card), such as Innovation, Wonder Soul, Monty, 8738, etc. Among them, 8738 is better to be a public driver, and some of them are noisy, even worse than the onboard sound blaster card.

3. It is best not to stick the sound card tightly near the video card or lean against the side of the chassis. If your motherboard has more than three PCI slots (mine has five), I suggest that the sound card be installed in the second slot (from the bottom of the chassis), which is separated from the AGP graphics card by three PCI slots for the best recording effect. If the video card is too close, and the video card is a miscellaneous brand, it may cause silk noise interference and increase the processing difficulty.

4. Temporarily remove the network card, cat and acquisition card except the sound card. Of course, the impact of these devices may not be, perhaps very small, but it may be troublesome to eliminate the impact.

Finally, you should unplug the audio cable from the CD-ROM drive to the sound card.

If you are a computer expert, I suggest you do the above steps, after all, you can complete the task in a few minutes; If you are not familiar with computer hardware, forget it! Don't open the box again, or I can't take responsibility for any problems! ~ My current equipment is K7-900, innovative SBlive.

There are several kinds of recorders to choose from: generally speaking, the first choice is the recording and playback card holder and the monitoring card holder, followed by the desktop, and finally the walkman. Of course, a professional recording booth is the best choice, but there are not many friends who have this ability, so I won't talk about it here. After all, I only saw one desktop in the second-hand market, asking price 1.200 yuan. It should be the equipment that most friends should have, like the previous brands such as Yanwu, Chunlei, Chunri, LH, Feitian, Singing Bar and Beauty. In the desktop, the device that touches the movement lightly is the first choice, that is, the key stroke is short. The movement of this equipment is more durable, and it was made in Japan in the early days (don't hit me), so the vibration is small. Judging whether your action is a light touch is simple: unplug the power plug, open the hatch, and press the playback button of the recorder to observe. If the magnetic head can rise to the playback position, it is not a light touch motion. If your head stays in its original position, congratulations. Imported brands are better for walkman, and the jitter is lower than that of domestic brands, but the output is earphone output, which may be too noisy. "This is not absolute. I have seen a Panasonic Walkman, the effect is better than ordinary desktop, and it comes with Dolby noise reduction, dnr 1394〝. The equipment I am using now is1a LH8686 desktop bought by 40 yuan from the second-hand market. The movement adopts light touch movement. I removed all the wires inside and added a preamplifier with high conversion rate. If you are an electronic enthusiast, there are many books and articles in this field, so I won't introduce how to reform them.

Transfer line The transfer line is the kind of transfer line with two 3.5mm plugs (generally). You can buy it for 3 yuan in the market, and the sound quality is passable. If it is inconvenient to buy, you can make it yourself: the simplest thing is to find two broken stereo headphones, remove the headphones, leave the wires and plugs, and then connect them separately. Don't forget to pack them separately. After completion, use a multimeter to measure whether there is a short circuit and an open circuit between lines. If not, you can apply them. I also bought a 2.5-meter high-grade transcription line (40 yuan), and the effect was not obvious after the test. So I don't think it's appropriate for recording to have high requirements for transfer lines. But the transcription line must be shielded.

In addition, monitor headphones should pay attention to a passable monitor and monitor speaker. When the monitor is turned on, it may interfere with some sound cards, resulting in line frequency calls mixed in the recording. This is the general solution. When you start recording, start monitoring, turn off the monitoring before the music starts, and turn on the monitoring after the music ends to remove the noise DEL at both ends. Monitor the volume and sound quality of speakers and monitor headphones when they monitor the recording. Because there are many uncertainties in each playback, monitoring is more important. I think monitor headphones is more practical, and the price is not high. A few tens of yuan 100 yuan can meet the requirements. It's best to wear it, so that the reaction is more objective and not disturbed by the outside world.

There may still be a lot to pay attention to. Let's think of these for the time being, and communicate with each other about specific issues in the specific operation process!

Part II: About software.

Operating system The common operating system is WIN95. Win97.win98.winme.winnt.win2000.winxp and linux. Among them, 98.2000.me and XP are more suitable. Never installed linux, I don't know. Win95 and 97 don't support some hardware very well, and some drivers and multimedia programs of WINNT don't execute well.

It is best to install the random driver or the latest driver of your sound card. If you feel that there is a problem in the recording process and other corrections can't be solved, you'd better change the driver or use the public version driver. Sometimes, the best driver is not necessarily the latest driver. In addition, the motherboard patch must be installed and suitable for the current operating system patch.

The recording software chooses the Chinese version of CoolEDIT Pro, which is easy to use and has a good effect. If you are not familiar with it, you can also choose one that comes with Nero program. One thing should be clear: this kind of software is not good or bad, but suitable and unsuitable in some aspects. CoolEDIT Pro is more suitable, and the post-processing function is very strong.

Compression software lame3.9 1 with shell is recommended. There should be an updated version now. I haven't tried it yet. If a friend needs it, I can put these two programs on the boat.

Part III: Recording and Compression

Preparation before recording The following are the preparations that need to be done before recording, most of which are necessary and necessary!

1. Turn on the computer, check whether the software works normally, configure the cache of the Cooledit program, and reserve at least 1G of hard disk space (it can record 1.5 hours);

2. Connect the transcription line between the computer and the tape recorder;

3. If possible, try to make the tape recorder and computer power supply without sockets;

4. The recorder is more than 1.5m away from the display. So as not to magnetize the display!

5. To clean the magnetic head of the tape recorder, just use the special cleaning agent for the magnetic head. If not, both anhydrous ethanol and carbon tetrachloride are feasible. When cleaning, pay attention to cleaning the whole tape channel together, including recording and playback head, tape rack, pinch roller, capstan, etc. Do not play the sound immediately after cleaning, and the interval should be greater than 10 minute. Before playing, observe whether there are fabric fibers and magnetic stains on the pinch roller, and observe the operation of the pinch roller and take-up roller after electrifying. If necessary, try to block the rotation by hand. If you find that the torque is too large, you need to repair the take-up roller (otherwise the jitter is serious), and if the take-up roller is too small, you need to repair it (otherwise it is easy to get stuck). Generally, it is better to pinch by hand, and it is not easy to be pinched.

6. tape preparation: before preparing for transcription, you should be familiar with the tape program, listen to it at least 1 time, and master the contents: mainly including (1) the length of the tape, (2) whether the overall volume of the tape is balanced, (3) whether the tape is dynamically balanced, (4) whether the tape has serious defects, such as tape distortion and demagnetization, (5) If jitter or pitch changes are found before and after the audition, find out the reasons in time. After eliminating the cause of the player, it can generally be judged that the internal resistance of the tape is large or uneven. Fast rewind 1 ~ 2 times can solve the problem. If it still doesn't work, it is recommended to find a high-quality tape, export a part to another tape drive, and import the tape to be recorded into a high-speed tape drive. I used the genuine SONY60min tape of 1998. According to my experience, Sony and TDK are better choices.

Start cooledit to record. There are many tutorials about Cooledit on the Internet. You can explore them yourself or find them yourself, so I won't teach fish to swim. ) Create a trial recording segment of a new file, and determine the recording and playback volume of this segment. If the computer can't correct it, you need to change the volume of the player to choose the appropriate recording level. The recording range is based on the sampling reference determined above. If you are not sure, you can record it twice more. The requirement is that the maximum display should not exceed-3db, otherwise the distortion is serious, and the average should not be lower than-12, otherwise the volume is inappropriate (too small). After the trial recording is appropriate, the official recording: be careful not to change the volume of the tape recorder and the volume of the recording mixer on the computer during the official recording. In order to avoid noise cancellation, the benchmark cannot be determined. You can record more in the blank sections at the beginning and end of the tape, generally 1 ~ 2 min, which is convenient for noise sampling in future production. Also, after the tape recorder is turned on until the end of recording, you should keep a distance of 1m from the tape recorder, and don't press the key near the tape recorder, otherwise it will easily induce communication sound (some machines have this problem).

Post-processing and compression post-processing are time-consuming tasks, so I suggest you be patient. In addition, the processing work in this period is different because of the different contents of the records, so it can't be the same. Let me briefly explain some commonly used items:

1. De-noising: Select the blank area at the beginning and end of the tape as the sampling area, and select the whole tape for de-noising after sampling. Generally, tape denoising sampling is based on one side, that is, side A sampling eliminates side A and side B sampling eliminates side B. For language-based content, denoising needs to be thorough. For the content of music and song theme, you can denoise it twice. The first sampling can be 80 ~ 95, and the second sampling can be repeated for denoising.

2. Noise treatment: For some tapes, there is still obvious noise after denoising, that is, noise, so denoising is needed. See the menu for elimination methods.

3. If necessary, repair the broken sound, balance the parameters, dynamically adjust and so on. Finally, the sound field phase processing should be carried out and the master band width should be selected. If you are already very familiar with it, you may wish to carry out deeper post-processing to obtain the most satisfactory auditory effect.

I need to explain that the recorded content plays a decisive role in all post-processing. All processing should be based on the premise that it is suitable for the performance or helpful for the perfect performance of the recorded content. ! ! ! If treatment affects the expressive force and appeal of music, it is better to make him feel comfortable without treatment.

5. Compression: There are many options for compression. Generally, 128/44 or VBR can be selected. It is suggested to compress the original tape with good quality to 192. If there are many high-frequency components in the tape, which belong to performance content, it can be 256 up to 320. If the language content reaches 128 or 160, there is no need to be higher. If the belt quality is average, you can choose 56/80. If you don't listen to MP3 frequently, you can compress it into non-standard sampling formats such as 22/32 to save hard disk space.

Second, computer to tape.

The recorder needs some interfaces (choose one of the following)

First, the standard in/out interface is one red and one white, corresponding to the left channel and the right channel. Required audio cable: one for two, that is, one end can be plugged into the computer, and the other end has two red and white cables, which are respectively plugged into the in port of the tape recorder.

Second, the small microphone port, just like the microphone port on the computer. Audio cable required: both ends are the same, and one end is plugged into the computer. Plug in a tape recorder at the other end.

If the tape recorder has such interfaces, it must have the function of recording from these interfaces. Take your time.

At this time, you can record when you turn on the music, but you will record all the sounds made by the computer sound card.

Similarly, you can record music from MP3 to tape.

Third, other equipment:

Connect the headphone jack of the tape drive with the line input of the computer sound card with a double-ended audio cable.

Play the tape

In computers, recorder software is used for recording.

But the effect is not very good.

There are detailed information below, hoping to help you.

Transcribing a magnetic tape into MP3 is a simple and complicated process. Simply put, take a pair of line outputs from a tape recorder and the line input from a sound card, find a suitable software to record and then compress it. To say complex means that there are many places to pay attention to in the process of re-recording. If a step goes wrong, it will affect the recording quality. Although I transcribed hundreds of tapes, few of them were satisfied after listening carefully. Now, at the request of my friends, I write down my own practices and experiences, and welcome your criticisms and suggestions.

Part I: Hardware preparation.

The hardware includes a computer and a tape recorder, as well as necessary connecting lines (usually 3.5/3.5 transfer lines).

computer

1. It is recommended to choose a PC with a main frequency above 300MHZ. If the main frequency is too low, it will increase the processing difficulty and slow down the processing speed. I don't think anyone wants to reduce noise for a song all night!

2. The sound card is better to be independent than the motherboard integrated sound card (of course, some motherboard integrated sound cards have good performance, and the recording effect is not worse than the independent sound card), such as Innovation, Wonder Soul, Monty, 8738, etc. Among them, 8738 is better to be a public driver, and some of them are noisy, even worse than the onboard sound blaster card.

3. It is best not to stick the sound card tightly near the video card or lean against the side of the chassis. If your motherboard has more than three PCI slots (mine has five), I suggest that the sound card be installed in the second slot (from the bottom of the chassis), which is separated from the AGP graphics card by three PCI slots for the best recording effect. If the video card is too close, and the video card is a miscellaneous brand, it may cause silk noise interference and increase the processing difficulty.

4. Temporarily remove the network card, cat and acquisition card except the sound card. Of course, the impact of these devices may not be, perhaps very small, but it may be troublesome to eliminate the impact.

Finally, you should unplug the audio cable from the CD-ROM drive to the sound card.

If you are a computer expert, I suggest you do the above steps, after all, you can complete the task in a few minutes; If you are not familiar with computer hardware, forget it! Don't open the box again, or I can't take responsibility for any problems! ~ My current equipment is K7-900, innovative SBlive.

There are several kinds of recorders to choose from: generally speaking, the first choice is the recording and playback card holder and the monitoring card holder, followed by the desktop, and finally the walkman. Of course, a professional recording booth is the best choice, but there are not many friends who have this ability, so I won't talk about it here. After all, I only saw one desktop in the second-hand market, asking price 1.200 yuan. It should be the equipment that most friends should have, like the previous brands such as Yanwu, Chunlei, Chunri, LH, Feitian, Singing Bar and Beauty. In the desktop, the device that touches the movement lightly is the first choice, that is, the key stroke is short. The movement of this equipment is more durable, and it was made in Japan in the early days (don't hit me), so the vibration is small. Judging whether your action is a light touch is simple: unplug the power plug, open the hatch, and press the playback button of the recorder to observe. If the magnetic head can rise to the playback position, it is not a light touch motion. If your head stays in its original position, congratulations. Imported brands are better for walkman, and the jitter is lower than that of domestic brands, but the output is earphone output, which may be too noisy. "This is not absolute. I have seen a Panasonic Walkman, the effect is better than ordinary desktop, and it comes with Dolby noise reduction, dnr 1394〝. The equipment I am using now is1a LH8686 desktop bought by 40 yuan from the second-hand market. The movement adopts light touch movement. I removed all the wires inside and added a preamplifier with high conversion rate. If you are an electronic enthusiast, there are many books and articles in this field, so I won't introduce how to reform them.

Transfer line The transfer line is the kind of transfer line with two 3.5mm plugs (generally). You can buy it for 3 yuan in the market, and the sound quality is passable. If it is inconvenient to buy, you can make it yourself: the simplest thing is to find two broken stereo headphones, remove the headphones, leave the wires and plugs, and then connect them separately. Don't forget to pack them separately. After completion, use a multimeter to measure whether there is a short circuit and an open circuit between lines. If not, you can apply them. I also bought a 2.5-meter high-grade transcription line (40 yuan), and the effect was not obvious after the test. So I don't think it's appropriate for recording to have high requirements for transfer lines. But the transcription line must be shielded.

In addition, monitor headphones should pay attention to a passable monitor and monitor speaker. When the monitor is turned on, it may interfere with some sound cards, resulting in line frequency calls mixed in the recording. This is the general solution. When you start recording, start monitoring, turn off the monitoring before the music starts, and turn on the monitoring after the music ends to remove the noise DEL at both ends. Monitor the volume and sound quality of speakers and monitor headphones when they monitor the recording. Because there are many uncertainties in each playback, monitoring is more important. I think monitor headphones is more practical, and the price is not high. A few tens of yuan 100 yuan can meet the requirements. It's best to wear it, so that the reaction is more objective and not disturbed by the outside world.

There may still be a lot to pay attention to. Let's think of these for the time being, and communicate with each other about specific issues in the specific operation process!

Part II: About software.

Operating system The common operating system is WIN95. Win97.win98.winme.winnt.win2000.winxp and linux. Among them, 98.2000.me and XP are more suitable. Never installed linux, I don't know. Win95 and 97 don't support some hardware very well, and some drivers and multimedia programs of WINNT don't execute well.

It is best to install the random driver or the latest driver of your sound card. If you feel that there is a problem in the recording process and other corrections can't be solved, you'd better change the driver or use the public version driver. Sometimes, the best driver is not necessarily the latest driver. In addition, the motherboard patch must be installed and suitable for the current operating system patch.

The recording software chooses the Chinese version of CoolEDIT Pro, which is easy to use and has a good effect. If you are not familiar with it, you can also choose one that comes with Nero program. One thing should be clear: this kind of software is not good or bad, but suitable and unsuitable in some aspects. CoolEDIT Pro is more suitable, and the post-processing function is very strong.

Compression software lame3.9 1 with shell is recommended. There should be an updated version now. I haven't tried it yet. If a friend needs it, I can put these two programs on the boat.

Part III: Recording and Compression

Preparation before recording The following are the preparations that need to be made before recording, most of which are necessary and necessary!

1. Turn on the computer, check whether the software works normally, configure the cache of the Cooledit program, and reserve at least 1G of hard disk space (it can record 1.5 hours);

2. Connect the transcription line between the computer and the tape recorder;

3. If possible, try to make the tape recorder and computer power supply without sockets;

4. The recorder is more than 1.5m away from the display. So as not to magnetize the display!

5. To clean the magnetic head of the tape recorder, just use the special cleaning agent for the magnetic head. If not, both anhydrous ethanol and carbon tetrachloride are feasible. When cleaning, pay attention to cleaning the whole tape channel together, including recording and playback head, tape rack, pinch roller, capstan, etc. Do not play the sound immediately after cleaning, and the interval should be greater than 10 minute. Before playing, observe whether there are fabric fibers and magnetic stains on the pinch roller, and observe the operation of the pinch roller and take-up roller after electrifying. If necessary, try to block the rotation by hand. If you find that the torque is too large, you need to repair the take-up roller (otherwise the jitter is serious), and if the take-up roller is too small, you need to repair it (otherwise it is easy to get stuck). Generally, it is better to pinch by hand, and it is not easy to be pinched.

6. tape preparation: before preparing for transcription, you should be familiar with the tape program, listen to it at least 1 time, and master the contents: mainly including (1) the length of the tape, (2) whether the overall volume of the tape is balanced, (3) whether the tape is dynamically balanced, (4) whether the tape has serious defects, such as tape distortion and demagnetization, (5) If jitter or pitch changes are found before and after the audition, find out the reasons in time. After eliminating the cause of the player, it can generally be judged that the internal resistance of the tape is large or uneven. Fast rewind 1 ~ 2 times can solve the problem. If it still doesn't work, it is recommended to find a high-quality tape, export a part to another tape drive, and import the tape to be recorded into a high-speed tape drive. I used the genuine SONY60min tape of 1998. According to my experience, Sony and TDK are better choices.

Start cooledit to record. There are many tutorials about Cooledit on the Internet. You can explore them yourself or find them yourself, so I won't teach fish to swim. ) Create a trial recording segment of a new file, and determine the recording and playback volume of this segment. If the computer can't correct it, you need to change the volume of the player to choose the appropriate recording level. The recording range is based on the sampling reference determined above. If you are not sure, you can record it twice more. The requirement is that the maximum display should not exceed-3db, otherwise the distortion is serious, and the average should not be lower than-12, otherwise the volume is inappropriate (too small). After the trial recording is appropriate, the official recording: be careful not to change the volume of the tape recorder and the volume of the recording mixer on the computer during the official recording. In order to avoid noise cancellation, the benchmark cannot be determined. You can record more in the blank sections at the beginning and end of the tape, generally 1 ~ 2 min, which is convenient for noise sampling in future production. Also, after the tape recorder is turned on until the end of recording, you should keep a distance of 1m from the tape recorder, and don't press the key near the tape recorder, otherwise it will easily induce communication sound (some machines have this problem).

Post-processing and compression post-processing are time-consuming tasks, so I suggest you be patient. In addition, the processing work in this period is different because of the different contents of the records, so it can't be the same. Let me briefly explain some commonly used items:

1. De-noising: Select the blank area at the beginning and end of the tape as the sampling area, and select the whole tape for de-noising after sampling. Generally, tape denoising sampling is based on one side, that is, side A sampling eliminates side A and side B sampling eliminates side B. For language-based content, denoising needs to be thorough. For the content of music and song theme, you can denoise it twice. The first sampling can be 80 ~ 95, and the second sampling can be repeated for denoising.

2. Noise treatment: For some tapes, there is still obvious noise after denoising, that is, noise, so denoising is needed. See the menu for elimination methods.

3. If necessary, repair the broken sound, balance the parameters, dynamically adjust and so on. Finally, the sound field phase processing should be carried out and the master band width should be selected. If you are already very familiar with it, you may wish to carry out deeper post-processing to obtain the most satisfactory auditory effect.

I need to explain that the recorded content plays a decisive role in all post-processing. All processing should be based on the premise that it is suitable for the performance or helpful for the perfect performance of the recorded content. ! ! ! If treatment affects the expressive force and appeal of music, it is better to make him feel comfortable without treatment.

5. Compression: There are many options for compression. Generally, 128/44 or VBR can be selected. It is suggested to compress the original tape with good quality to 192. If there are many high-frequency components in the tape, which belong to performance content, it can be 256 up to 320. If the language content reaches 128 or 160, there is no need to be higher. If the belt quality is average, you can choose 56/80. If you don't listen to MP3 frequently, you can compress it into non-standard sampling formats such as 22/32 to save hard disk space.