Record your favorite talk shows with digital recording
By Lim Tri Santosa
BANDUNG (JP): People now feel free to say whatever they think, and during the recent turmoil television and radio political talk shows have apparently stolen the hearts of many people.
The programs provide the audience with differing views on interesting topics through lively and entertaining debates. Guest speakers include experts and intellectuals, not only supporters of the government but also critics, who clearly state their arguments and objections.
Talk shows are generally good and critical in their approach, although they sometimes lack objectivity.
Let's start our discussion with the audio.
What we perceive as sound is vibrations. Audio engineers describe the patterns of vibrations as waveforms. The motion of air on our eardrums is translated by our brain as speech, music or just noise. Larger motions of air are perceived as louder, faster motions of air are perceived as higher pitched.
The invention of the magnetic cassette allowed sound for the first time to be recorded and replayed. Audio on computers and compact discs is stored as digital information. This takes the form of a series of values, which represent an approximation of the analog version at a given point in time. These values are called samples, and the amount of samples taken per second is called the sample rate.
How accurate the digital representation of a waveform is will be limited by the sample rate and the number of bits used for each sample. An eight-bit sample can represent 256 levels of amplitude, and a 16-bit sample can represent 65,536.
Professional-level audio devices can go up to 24 bits and PC's typically use 16 bits, although some older soundcards can only use eight bits.
Windows 95 was Microsoft's first multimedia-oriented operating system and it introduced a number of forward-thinking approaches to multimedia. This included the Microsoft wave file, which took traditional sound recorders such as Microsoft Sound Recorder, which could record to memory, and allowed you to save the results on disk.
This means that the amount of audio you can record is limited to the amount of memory you have. Somehow, Sound Recorder is not effective, so we need another tool that can handle sound files effectively and efficiently, putting them directly into the hard disk.
Audiotools (http://www.btinternet.com/~amfish/index.htm) is such a direct-to-disk sound recorder. Audiotools allow you to record directly from your audio source. It performs several processes on the sound recording and records the results straight on disk so you will not lose your recording even if there is a power failure.
The main window, displayed on start-up, allows you to easily set up the basic input and output settings for recording your new wave files. This includes setting a source that can be either a wave file or soundcard input and setting a destination file name. It uses the destination file name as a base for generating consecutively numbered files for each track as it records.
Most soundcards will have one or two input connections which take a 3.5mm stereo jack. One of these will be a line input, the other, if present, will be a mic input. For best results, you should connect to the line input and do not forget to remove the check from the line input box in your Windows's audio mixer. The other end of the cable will connect to your audio source, which is typically a speaker output.
Once the properties are setup, click the record button. The program immediately starts recording, processing and writing the wave file directly to the destination file you specified. You can also press the pause button if there is a commercial in the middle of your talk show and press play again to continue recording.
By the way, you can also record your favorite songs from radio or television, but please do not distribute them, because this would violate copyright laws. When a track ends, the program automatically detects the silence, advances the track number and starts writing the next wave file. If the automatic track detection doesn't work because songs aren't divided by silence or can't be detected, you can manually click the Track button instead.
Another good tool to improve audio quality is CleanWav (www.excla.com/wavclean/). This software can be used to improve the audio quality of records and eliminate hiss sound from bad audio sources. If you are an avid listener of foreign radio stations, especially on the shortwave band, you will notice a hissing sound. The main purpose of this software is to reduce the noise after you record a broadcast.
There are two CleanWav options to reduce noise. The clarify option is useful when you launder voice and music. It minimizes the degradation of sound in the high-frequency range. Laundering with the Scrub option eliminates noise, but has the side effect of degrading the sound.
Users should try various slider positions to get the optimum audio result. I recommend checking the quality of laundered sound before finishing the input wave file. The beauty of this program is that there is a play button to hear the original audio file and a play button to hear the result, thus you can compare between the two before you save the clean sound on hard disk.
Final Analysis
The problem with wave files are the size. Even for a half minute 11 Khz mono audio, it takes 600 Kb. So I recommend converting it to MP3 file, which is a tenth of the original wave file and has the same quality.
The best and most stable software to encode wave files into MP3 files is the commercial MP3 Producer (www.opticom.de), but there are several free MP3 encoders you can download at mp3.com. A one-minute 11 KHz mono audio MP3 file will take about 150 KB.
Thus one 1.4 MB floppy diskette can hold around nine and a half minutes of voice with the quality of telephone audio. It is efficient. For the best audio player, I recommend the freeware WinAmp audio player (www.winamp.com).
Audiotools is a great program for recording and cleaning up audio from soundcard input or wave file. The interface is straightforward and doesn't waste extra screen space. It is not the most powerful or feature packed software on the market, but I highly recommend it to the average audio listener who wants to transfer their records and tapes into the digital realm, especially at Audiotools' and CleanWav's more than reasonable price (US$20).
Talk shows are now considered to be a surefire and inexpensive way to improve the image of a television or radio station and boost ratings. It's just a form of entertainment which allows people to express their thoughts, while at the same time we are free to hear and judge their critical voices.