Capture to file from Audio CD

5 replies [Last post]
Chris Peacock
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Joined: May 5 1999

I have a couple of "Copyright free" music CDs that I'd like to use for projects edited on PC (Premiere). How can I capture to .wav or other usable format?

The CD's can be played with MediaPlayer etc. I've tried Sound Recorder (which comes with Windows 98) but with no success. What am I missing?

Wayne Paul Kinney
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Joined: May 6 1999

Chris, open up Sound Recorder and Media Player as you did before. Now, in Sound Recorder, go to the 'Edit' menu and click on 'Audion Properties'. a window will appear showing you information such as which sound card you are using. In the recording section, click on the button under the word 'Recording'. Another window will appear with a few volume sliders. In the 'CD' section, make sure that the 'Select' box is ticked, if not click on it. Also make sure that the slider is at the top. Now click 'Apply' in the previous window. Now play the music CD in Media Player and hit 'record' in Sound Recorder. The music should now be copying to the computer. When finished, hit 'stop' to stop recording and go to the File menu and click on Save AS. find the folder on the hard drive where you want to save the music and type in a name for the music in the 'File Name' box. Now click on 'Save'.

The music will be saved in .WAV format and can be imported into Premiere.

Hope this helps,

Wayne Kinney

e-mail at WAYNEKINNEY@CURRANTBUN.COM

jarroda
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Joined: Mar 31 1999

Also, try a utility called Audiograbber.

You can get it from download.com

It will capture tracks at many times the normal speed and much, much more...

Essential item.

Andy

Chris Peacock
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Joined: May 5 1999

Andy and Wayne, many thanks, both hints worked. Audigrabber gives top quality but large files. Sound Recorder seems to be limited to 60 seconds, and gives sratchy result, but much smaller files. Also Media Player does not seem to read audio CDs, I used Delux CD Player instead.

Cheers

Ken W
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Joined: Apr 9 1999

Chris
Your right about windows recorder defaulting to 60 secs. However if you want to use this for it's small file size then play around with the slider at the bottom, let it play for a while, then while it's still playing drag it back a little with the mouse, you will see the recording time change to longer if you drag the right way. Very fiddly but does work. Don't ask me how to change the 60 sec default, microsoft have me beat on that one (for now). Does anyone know the answer?
Regards
Ken

RichardJ
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Joined: May 7 1999

If you're going to do audio recording on any sort of regular basis I would get something more capable than sound-recorder. CoolEdit 96 (from Syntrillium) is probably one of the best value sound editors, and has recording capability built-in. There are plenty of other tools if you look around.

Audiograbber is one of several programs that uses a process called DAE (digital audio extraction) which reads the digitised waveform directly off the CD - like data. It gives the best result and preserves CD quality (44.1 KHz 16-bit stereo), but the files are fairly big (big? this is a video group, we know about big ). However, using a sound editor (even sound-recorder) you can load and save the file again at a lower sampling rate if you want.

How well DAE works depends enormously on your CD-ROM drive. Data CD-ROM drives are not required to support it at all, and different manufacturers obviously give it different priority as a feature. It doesn't usually work as fast as reading data, sometimes you may find an 8x or higher drive will only do DAE at single-speed. You just have to try it on your system and see if and how well it works.

Xing also sell a specially-badged version of Audiograbber called Audio Catalyst with a fast built-in MP3 encoder.

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Richard Jones

Richard Jones, http://www.activeservice.co.uk
Home of the MediaStudio Pro Tutorial - Edition 3 for MSP 7