Sorry if this question has been asked a thousand times before.
I have CD decks (Denon DN-1800F) and a mixer (DN-X400). The mixer has 2 digital outputs, coaxial and optical. I want to record my mixes onto my hard drive at the highest quality possible, for burning onto CD-R. Unfortunately I only have my girlfriends Dell Pentium 4 with built in sound card, with the standard audio in port. There are also USB 2.0 and firewire ports.
1) Presumably, I'm going to need a new soundcard. I don't want to spend a fortune, maybe 150 quid. Should I get a high end creative card or a low-end professional card?
2) What's the best software for recording incoming audio? (I don't need to edit the audio, will Audacity do?)
3) What's the best format to record this sound as?
Thanks
Comments
as far as quality goes... cd format is 44.1khz@16bits, so you co
as far as quality goes... cd format is 44.1khz@16bits, so you could record at a higher quality, for archiving purposes, but you can't get above that quality on a cd. if you've already mixed the audio down to a single stereo output, any audio interface would work. I started out using M-Audio's Transit USB interace. It supports higher sample rates too...
You said you don't need to edit the audio? I always used Cool Edit Pro to capture the stereo audio... but others will work as well.
hope that helps somewhat...