I've got some recordings of the local orchestra and wanted to put them onto CDs for a few people. Do I need special software for it to sound professional? I wasn't sure what format the music needs to be in for standard players and MP3 doesn't always sound good. Help?
gofar99 Messages: 1902 Registered: May 2010 Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
Hi, I suggest you use the free program Audicity. You can feed the sound into your PC via the line input (make sure it is stereo) and edit, clean up, rearrange and set track separations in Audicity. Then use it to export (different from save) to a file. You can use the file in Audicity or another program (I like Nero) to burn it to CDs. If you don't have a burner drive then it is not possible to make a CD. Fortunately external burners for CD/DVD are quite cheap now and connect via a USB port.
I have Audacity, Nero and a burner, but I normally burn spoken word CDs for use in PCs. I've been told music for Hi-fi systems needs to be burned at higher quality, so I wasn't sure if I needed a different format, and there's a difference between + and - DVDRs if I used them.
gofar99 Messages: 1902 Registered: May 2010 Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
Hi The best you can do on CDs is 44K/16bit. Higher resolutions will not generally play on most CD/DVD players. Audio Systems with digital to analog capability can do a lot more but you still need to know what you are able to play back. I like 96K/24bit for storing my music. I rip my LPs to that standard. It is difficult to tell from the LP and makes files that are not too huge for storage. Depending on what your original source is this would probably be a suitable resolution. The possibilities go all the way to 384K/32bit. Overkill in nearly all situations. MP3s and other compressed files go from very low resolution, but very compact to a number of lossless ones that are naturally larger. Audacity can create many of these various files and nero can burn them nicely to CDs. I like it best of the various burners I have around here. What I suggest is that you take one file and make a high quality digital copy and play with it to get the results you want. Disks are now quite cheap and if you waste a few it is no great loss.
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