analoge tapes -> ogg/mp3 program suggestions
 

Hi all:D

Rainy holiday weekend and I figure it's a good time to start a project.

I have a lot of live music I've accumulated over the years on analoge tapes and wish to convert them to ogg or mp3 and clean them up along the way. I've done some searches and looked at what's available to accomplish this and there's alot.

I was just curious if anyone who has done this can recommend some programs that they found worked well for them - things that sucked as well. Thots on ogg vs mp3 etc - tho this is discussed here on several threads...

I'm running SuSE and it comes with quite a few programs already - nothing for cleaning up recordings as far as I can tell tho. Been playing with audacity for recording and conversion to oggs/mp3s the past couple days.

I've checked out turnkey - looks cool but like I said, SuSE comes with a lot already so...

Good links if you have them to howto's and such would also be welcome.

TIA

as much as i'd like to do that stuff in linux, i had much
better luck using adaptec's spin doctor for recording to
the hard drive, and cool edit pro, for the other things.
i think within a year the linux software will be good enough
for that type of thing.

audacity should be fine for doing that sort of thing. there are quite a few decent sound applications around now, but i can't remember what they're called... under windows i used to use totalrecorder, that really was a top bit of software...

Between Audacity, Glame and Turnkey, I can do everything I want. I would expect they can do all you want, too.
Don't underestimate the ability of wine to run Win audio apps, by the way. I have run Fruity Loops, CDEX and Cool Edit pro, in the past. I just tend to stick with Audacity now.

Thanks for the replies. :)

I think I'm one of the few people on the planet that haven't used the computer for music. Not having dsl or cable was a big factor, but I always figured I have nice sound system - why use the computer. (yes, I know, I can connect the two) Plus I never really had the time. But my tapes are just degrading and, after many moves, they have become disorganized beyond enjoyment. I figure if i'm gonna spend the time organizing them I may as well do it right and make them more accessable at the same time.

So, I dont have any windows audio apps and, while I still dual boot, I just aint spending another dime on windows or windows applications:tisk: I'm here for philosophical reasons and if I have to wait or deal with less than perfect so be it. Actually, if anything is gonna get in my way it'll be the quality of my sound card.:rolleyes:

I'm glad to hear Audacity has worked for you carlywarly - by the way, I see that your using SuSE 8.2 - in regard to turnkey did you have any issues with installation. With suse putting things in different places, I always try to find suse rpms - otherwise it's hit or miss. (like now I'm having problems getting fluxbox to install - even tho I did it fine on 3 other distros including suse 8.0)

What I would really like to find is a program to help me clean up the recordings (hiss and such) as well as play with the equalization. I had had some links at one point that discussed something that automatically removed pops from wavs recorded from vinyl, among other things, but I lost it.

Steve

I agree with the sound card point. I tried to digitize ultra-high quality LP output via my SBLive and found it gave continual problems such as noise and glitches on playback. The whole transcribing process is really laborious. I actually edit the .wav by hand to remove pops etc. A really high quality turntable and cartidge do help, though.
Turnkey on SuSE - I haven't installed it. I've only got it on my Mandrake machine because it's my best box.

Just wanted to say thanks for the input. Am using audacity for now and recording tape hiss to remove it through the noise remover module. There's alot more to that program than I'll ever be able to figure out :D

my first oggs came out pretty well - just some faint crackeling that seems to get intoduced when exporting to ogg. I'll have to play with some of the settings.

Thanks again

i have 10 diffrent kinds of sound cards, and never could
get one to get clean stereo input record in linux, but i
havn't tried since last summer. i got all my LP's recorded
already though, so i have little use for that now, but i
do have several that i need to do over. i didn't ever
stay with the LP's while they were recording, and as i've
been listening to them over the past couple of years,
there's a bunch of stuff with skips in them that i'll
plan to do over at some point.

The original recording from tape to to hardrive sounds OK - better than I expected. The crackling seems to be introduced during the compression to ogg. It's not terrible, but it's there. Sounds like what you would hear playing vinyl. Too many variables to check - makes you want to go watch TV :D