epepke said:
I am so burnt out with this that I am not trying anything anymore.
I don't know what clipping or resistor means and why should I. My problem is that in this country there is nobody who is supposed to know these things so as to tell me how to do it. The idiots at the radio station don't know as well since it's not what they do. I lose precious time trying to fix things I do not know. Now I am trying to find a site with info and basic glossary regarding pc sound.
I am too stubborn to quit.
Earthborn
Terrestrial Intelligence
Probably not necessary. Even the simplest and cheapest or oldest soundcard should give you satisfactory results. Expensive ones are mostly for MIDI anyway.Cleopatra said:
Sample Rate
The program you use to sample the sound should have a option with which quality the sound is recorded. It is probably labelled 'quality' or sampling rate and should give you options that look a bit like this: 11025, 22050, 44100. (There may be other sample rates as well) Sometimes also labelled Telephone quality, Radio quality and CD quality. Radio quality is often good enough: I know a few audiophiles who can't hear the difference between a good radio quality sample and one with CD quality. The amount of diskspace necessary will be half as small though!
An important thing to consider is whether you need stereo. If it is just spoken text or music without many stereo effects, use mono. That too will slash the filesize in half.
Recording Volume
You should make sure that the soundsource isn't too loud, because that will cause distortion. But also the recording volume should be too loud as that will record static. Both should be about in the middle.
Doubleclick the loudspeaker icon next to the clock (I'm assuming you use Windows) and you'll get a whole soundmixer. The first volume slider is the overall volume of the output. There should also be a Line In and a Microphone slider. If they are missing, click on Options in the menu, choose Properties and you'll get a dialog that allows you add sliders. Choose 'Recording devices' and there you can check the Microphone and Line In. (The exact names of the options depend of course on the language of the Windows version you use.)
The program you use to record the sound probably have sliders like this too, but most likely they will do exactly the same internally.
MP3 Encoding
If you tried all that, and the sample sounds good in your sample program, but not anymore when saved as an MP3, you should check whether your program allows you to set the 'bitrate' when saving to MP3. Usually the higher the bitrate, the better the sound, however a doubling of the bitrate, doesn't double the quality, so you'll have to experiment what sounds acceptable to you.
A good trick to increase the quality of sound while still keeping the same bitrate is by making it mono. A mono MP3 will be the same size as a stereo one with the same bitrate, however it will sound better because it can use that same space for only one soundchannel, instead of cramming two in it.
Conclusion
No, you probably don't have to get any resistors and you don't have to solder anything. But getting sound from an analog source into your computer can be fiddly and you'll have to experiment with some of the settings of the programs you use as well as getting to volumes of the source and the recording soundcard just right.
There are unfortunately no simple general guidelines that will always work perfectly. This is because it depends very much on what you are trying to accomplish: what kind of quality you need, and how much of your harddisk you want to dedicate to it. The computer is unable to know what you will think is satisfactory.
I hope this helps.
