Help with digital radios and CDs (in Off-topic)

Hi all. I need a bit of a hand here. My father-in-law has a digital radio on his PC, and wants to record a radio program (In Real Player?) onto CD.

I have no idea how to even start with this! :/

Can he just use SoundRecorded to make a big ole WAV file, and then convert that to MP3?

I think Sound Recorded might have size limitations...check out Audacity. It can record audio and then save as MP3, I believe.

Or google for any other sound utilities that can record "live" audio and save in a variety of formats...

Good luck!

Good grief, I meant "Sound Recorder", under Windows Accessories Entertainment... I think Audacity is probably still your best bet.

To "Export as MP3" from Audacity, you will need the LAME encoder. There are instructions on the Audacity site for where to get it and how to install it, and then Audacity will help you locate the encoder the first time you record a sound and do File | Export to MP3... menu option.

OK, more info, in case you need help... Recording can be tricky if you have never done it before.

This seems to work on Audacity:

- Have whatever audio running in background. As long as it is running through the soundcard and out the computer speakers, this should work.
- Fire up Audacity.
- There is a little down-arrow next to a microphone icon in upper right. Click that to reveal a drop-down menu, and select "Monitor input". The little bars above that (the monitor the signal) may turn read and/or fluctuate. This is good, especially if they are undulating along with the sound currently playing.
- Turn down the volume slider next to the mic icon toward the left of the screen. This control the monitor volume. You want it so that the bars in upper right are not getting maxed out all the time (otherwise your sound will get clipped and distorted).
- Once everything looks OK, click the record button (big red dot) to record a while. You should see a waveform building in a track.
- Stop recording, turn off whatever other music is playing, and then play back the waveform in Audacity. You should hear what you just recorded.
- You can then export to MP3 under the File menu, as long as you have the LAME encoder installed.

I would suggest recording a mono signal, otherwise that WAV file is going to get HUGE. I don't think Audacity can save directly to MP3 (that would save a ton of space), but others might know that.

Good luck!

Thanks! I think we're gonna try to do that instead of letting Claires dad do it! ;) I'll get audacity and give it a test run! ;)

Why go to MP3 if he wants it on CD?
Just save it as a .wav and burn that onto CD.

I don't know, just a thought. I was also trying to find something that went straight to MP3 with real-time encoding just to save on disk space... For a monaural talking broadcast, I doubt the format is really going to make much difference, and Audacity supports either.

RealAudio is already encoded, but differently. Converting to mp3 would mean yet another loss of quality. Anyway, a CD is only about 700MB...

Right, if he ended up going stereo for more than 70 minutes or so, the WAV wouldn't fit anyway. He could mess with sampling, etc, but this is GL we are talking about -- he's probably inebriated. *smile* If a CD player can handle playing MP3s, might as well pack on as much as possible...

It's not for me! ;) My father in law want's to record a BBC Radio 3 Jazz program onto CD (I think).

With a little bit of messing around, I got audacity working, I had to change it from 'Microphone' to 'Mono Mix' (I think!).

I not sure what the best format would be to save the program in (or how long it was on for, the link was broken when I tried..)

:)

Well, for sweet, sweet jazz he would probably like stereo... Though, if he was listening on a radio with one speaker anyway, doesn't really matter. *wink*