On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 09:13:29PM +0000, Simon Truss wrote:
> Richard Rauch wrote:
 [...]
> > * Honestly, most of the tapes that I'm working from are not that
> >   good.  The ones that are very clean are also the ones where
> >   high fidelity matters the least (interviews---as long as the
> >   interview is clear, I'm going to move on).
> 
> Sounds like 16/44 will do the job for your purpose then. gwc may prove

I think so, for now.


> useful. be careful with it, too much denoising blindly applied can
> introduce strange squeals and squelches so listen out and back off if

I've seen some strange results from being overly agressive with
Audacity's noise reduction.

It might be worth fiddling with a little for the music tapes, but
if I like the music enough to clean up a recording, I could just
buy a CD.  (^&  ...assuming that there's a CD available.


 [...]
> > * I do not think that any of my sound hardware can sample at more
> >   than 16 bits per sample.  Not with NetBSD drivers, anyway.
> >   If I wanted to play with this, what are some rough guides to
> >   the cost of such sound hardware?
> 
> I patched a  ?6 cmi8738 to sample 24bit(spdif) for the linux drivers.

I don't know what the ? is, above.  The mixed blessing of using English
more or less exclusively: I don't have to worry about non-ASCII sets
most of the time, and so I'm not prepared to do so.  (^&

My desktop has an spdif jack on it.  I don't have any toys to talk
to it, so I haven't worried about it.


 [...]
> > * At least one of my systems appears to have some internal buzz on
> >   the motherboard audio.  I assume that it is interference from
> >   the fields inside the box.  That limits the quality of recording
> >   that that machine can do.
> 
> Thats not so good. I use an outboard DAC/ADC and spdif to transfer data.
> Most sound cards I've played with (on the analogue side) have all been
> reasonable to good except the mic inputs. I have personally never had
> any luck with creative and I stopped trying when I saw a top of the line
> creative Audigy something underperform compared to my ?6 card :-)

I find that my laptop has pretty clean input on the line-in jack, so I've
been recording with that.  (The desktop's mic jack is the one with the
noise.)  So it's not too bad, but if I were setting up a recording
studio, I certainly couldn't use my main desktop the way it is.
(^&

-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/