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"Cool Edit" is now an adobe product. Their old website takes you straight to Adobe

If you look at my other posts you'll see that I don't think too favourably about small software companies.

I can name several small software companies that make great software, and will likely be purchased by bigger companies due to the quality of it. It's happened countless times in the past. A couple that come to mind at the moment are Bradsoft, Syntrillium, and Giant Software.

I'm not dead, I'm just taking a nap, damn it!

Seriously, lone coders are far from dead, just think of products like CoolEdit and you'll see what I mean.

As long as you write quality software enough people will want it so you don't have to starve.

OMG, Adobe bought out the lone coder of CoolEdit! It's now called Adobe Audition! Maybe the lone coder really is dead... Can someone please check my pulse? Hello? Can you hear me? It must be this new Adobe Audition codec crapping out, argh!

I've experimented with Linux and other open-source OSes for a while now, but I've never found one that can make a permanent home on my desktop. One major reason: No good multi-track recorder! Sure, there are options like Audacity, but there is nothing that can rival the mixing options of, say, Cool Edit Pro. For my mixing, I absolutely NEED features that I can control -- a good compressor, gain control, some decent effects, a reliable GUI, etc. Now, it looks like Ardour may offer that, and so I rejoice. This may be the last rail laid on my transitional track, and the golden spike is beautiful. So Ardour, I say bring it on. Lemme see what you got!

I'll second that. A musician buddy of mine is really interested in trying Linux, but until there's a replacement for Cool Edit Pro there's no point in him switching. Atfer all, what's the use of an OS that doesn't have the apps that caused you to get a computer in the first place?

Has anyone tried Cool Edit? It's a great program, and inexpensive. The Jew-controlled music industry is now obsolete!

The whole notion that Pro Tools and my personal favorite Cool Edit Pro (someone please make a Linux clone or port it with Wine or something!) will make the recording industry sell CDs for less is absurd.

Look guys, everyone here on Slashdot is always talking about the music revolution where the artist produces and markets their own music. Well its here now and guess what? It completely sucks.

Now it is super cheap and easy to get great results at home (if you have a clue what you are doing and most people DON'T!). You don't need expensive recording studios or audio technicians worth beans. The good part is that. I've been able to do a lot of my own production far cheaper than before and it sounds better, because I know what I'm doing and have been trained in the area.

The bad part is that so can Joe Sixpack and his band. Nobody thinks they need help, but 99% of people out there really need a second pair of ears (and someone with experience) more than they need high-tech recording gear.

Recording studios know this. Overproduced or not, Brittany or whatever decent looking bimbo they find on the Mickey Mouse club is easier to market than any good band that isn't pretty (thanks MTV). Now these unpretty, but good muscians are less likely to get a contract, partly because of filesharing.

An intelligent rock(jazz or whatever) band generally has a more sophisticated audience than Brittany Spears. Do most of the Slashdotters download Spears? Probably not. Whereas Boy Band audiences are less into technology.

Isn't it interesting how the free music revolution helped to kill real music? You guys got your free music and from here on out, that's what most of it is going to be worth no matter what Apple or anyone else makes us pay for it.

Whether or not filesharing is actually hurting revenue for bands themselves is another question, but in the eyes of a record company what makes more $$$? Do you think a real group would be more profitable or Brittany? In most cases, Brittany and the Boy Bands. They're also a lot less likely to try and bite the hand that feeds them a la Pearl Jam, Ticketmaster and MTV.

So now these good muscians who can't get a record deal can at least produce themselves, but the results are usually pathetic. Go on MP3.com and show me any really good homerecorded bands. Then tell me how long it took you to find them. Then tell me if you are actually going to go see them in concert.

Love 'em or hate 'em we need record companies, radio to sort through the crap so the cream can rise to the top. Kazaa or any of the other filesharing systems don't really expose you to new things. The only good music broadcast out there these days is at radioparadise.com. Tune in. You'll be glad you did.

I use a midiman DMAN 2044. It only works in Win98, but it's awesome. It has 4 in / 4 out 1/4inch jacks. I use CoolEdit Pro from Syntrillium software for multitrack recording and editing. Everyone I know in a band smacks their head after paying thousands of dollars to rent fancy studios when they see this cheapo setup.

Please, people, if you don't know what s/he's asking, keep your trap shut, m'kay? We're talking audio here, so signal-to-noise ratio counts, you see...

But, do you want to go the hardware or software recording route?

If you have a decent enough computer (G3 macs or PII upwards x86s will do the trick for about 16 tracks), you might consider getting a good soundcard.

I personally use a M-Audio Delta44, 4 inputs, 4 outputs, nothing more. Perfect for recording. They have nice break-out boxes, so you don't have to crouch behind your computer when plugging in your guitars, basses or mics, they work under Macs, PC's and have linux support via ALSA (yes, linux can do multitracking as well). When you need more tracks, you can just add more cards and get 8/8 or up to 16/16 in/out-system.

As for recording software, well... my delta came with a cut-down version of Logic Audio, which should be good enough for start. Most 'pro-sumer' soundcards come up with basic software, so you shouldn't need to cough up any more money for it in the beginning.

Other software: Cubase is nice, and there's nice 'lite'-versions for beginners (some soundcards come with this instead of logic). Cakewalk is quite popular as well.

If you just want audio recording (the aforementioned do MIDI as well), then there's Cool Edit Pro. For free, there's Audacity (audacity does Windows, Linux and Mac) which is proficient enough multitrack audio editor. SLab is a good linux multitrack recorder.

And mp3, well, you don't want to use mp3 for multitrack recording, but most modern software can import mp3-sounds, and output the result to mp3 (some of them [cool edit/audacity] can do ogg as well)

If you want a proper hardware recorder (which are nice, since you can take them to your rehersal space, summer cottage, ..., what have you), then there's plenty to choose from. Most of these are a couple of years old, so you can find them for reasonable prices used (or even new!)

Roland VS-8xx series, they're nice, compact, can do 4-track recording, and 8-track playback. Loads of features, and useful later on even if you grow out of this one. Earlier models had inbuilt harddrives, the later ones have ZIP-drives (if I remember correctly). If you can get one for cheap (and i think you should), then go for this one.

Korg D-8. A bit easier to operate, but quite useful nevertheless.

And i think Fostex had some as well, just keep your eyes open in the pawnshops.

So I'll post my own question, guessing what the post was supposed to be: I'm in the market for a digital multitrack, but since I'll be recording my wife's voice, a guitar and keyboard, I shouldn't need more than four tracks. I've seen lots of expensive digital 8-track and 16-track recorders, but a simple, high-quality digital equivalent of the old casette four-tracks (we own one of the casette types) would be really nice and would save some money. So what do people recommend?

Something off this page. From what you're asking, the Delta 66 may be the right one. Don't waste your time with cassettes, digital or not, when for about the same price, you get 6 in/6 out, and virtually unlimited tracks in software (CoolEdit, Cubase, etc.).

50 CDs - $12.00

Audio Editing Software - $249

Studio costs - However much you pay for your rent

Total: ~$500'000
Those maths skills sure come in handy!

I'm a musician. I manipulate samples. My favorite tool is CoolEdit Pro [syntrillium.com], but Sound Forge [sonicfoundry.com]is pretty popular, too.

These are Windows-only tools. There is a project to develop a distro for musicians (DeMuDi [demudi.org]), but the best Linux can do is Audacity [audacity.sourceforge.net], which is kind of like My Audio Editor by Fisher Price.

Until there are serious OSS audio engineering tools, I'm fucked.

Go here, scroll down to (or search for) Brainwave Synchronizer. Click Low or High Speed listen. Requires a JavaScript enabled browser.

Get CoolEdit and some headphones. Use its Brainwave Synchronizer filter and experiment with alpha, delta waves (or whatever) and there you go! Pretty neat stuff actually.

My brother is the real expert (eg. actually qualified in these things) but here's my best shot:

• Sound card with audio in, soundblasters are ok - if you get a good one I know about 10 people with an SB live, some are great, some are noisy as hell. If you get a noisy one I suggest you take it back and get a swap - $40
• Small mixer, something like a Sprit notepad is just fine for small applications, it has a few mic channels and a stereo in.. Ideal for small time recording - $200
• A good general purpose microphone, I agree with a shure, probably a SM58 is a good starting point - $90
• A mic cable, most of these will be pretty standard - $12
• A mic stand, essential - $30
• Audio samplign software, cool edit pro is very good, and you can try it shareware first - $400
• Misc connection cables - $50

Total: $822

This should give you a good start.. however you will also need some decent speakers - monitor speakers not just your hi-fi ones - and an appropriate amp for them. You could start with your hi-fi stuff but you need to something better pretty soon. I don't know if you were looking for something more than this for $1000 but this would be a good starting point. All I can say is that this is an expensive game, but very fun ;)

speaking from direct experience then CoolEdit from syntrillium is absolutely the best.

And I tried all the programs I could get on warez to find the best one.

CoolEdit has scratch and pop removal and works very well but even with that I ended up hand editing the waveforms for ultimate scratch removeal (including cutting and pasting clean bars from other segments of the same music).

tbh a bit of crackle and rumble does you no harm, it feels like listening to vinyl.

If recorded over 100 lps to mp3 from my collection.

It's a very long process to do well.

I encoded them at 256k (and then did a subtraction of the resulting wave forms to see what I was losing and it's not much)

It is much quicker to get them from gnutella (if you can find them) or on CD but usually they are only 128k and it's hard to get complete sets for each album. Most of my music isn't out there to download.

I'd be charging your uncle for the privilege because having an mp3 jukebox of all his recordings is a luxury he will be very glad of.

I have wired up my whole house with speakers in every room running from various amps and PC's all getting their mp3's over the network. It's fucking great!

my biggest win was a pair of 4" speakers from Maplin mounted in the bathroom ceiling. My 12 year old needs encouragement to get OUT of the shower instead on IN to it now he can blast his music out in there without having to piss about running cables and choosing cds

E.g, say you rely on your recording software to split tracks for you by detecting x amount of silence. Are you going to check all the tracks and further split the ones that are run together (maybe there was no silence between them)?

I use CoolEdit 2000 from Syntrillium for this kind of thing an amature restoration work. It's $69 and requires Windows. It has a lot of nice features for twiddling, including noise reduction. For clicks and pops, they have their Audio Cleanup Plug-in ($49) which can remove a fair amount of crackle/clicks/pops automatically (check the forums on their web site), though don't expect perfection. The quality of the results will be proportional to the amount of hands-on time you spend with each individual piece.

By the way, you'll probably get less noise if you record throught the line in on your card, as opposed to the microphone input.

Here are two that I've found:

Brainwave Generator - Handy windows program with builtin presets to do all the things you mentioned. This is probably the program you used.

Cool Edit Pro - This software has a Brain Synchronizer built in to allow you to create your own subliminal messages and brain synchronizer sounds.

Good grief. I suppose I should stay out of this, but I've been a professional composer using orchestral and electronic media for more than 30 years, and the PC has always provided the breadth of tools and configurability that I need, especially if I need to quickly build up a control device of some kind.

Look, I know those who started with Macs are happy with their stuff. That's fine. But I can't be tied to an Apple corporate stamp of approval for a product. For example, I'd not likely see an AudioMulch for Mac -- unless you consider Max, priced at 10 times the cost for similar functionality (and with Max lacking the ability to produce techno quickly, for example). And Sound Forge, Cool Edit Pro, Cakewalk, Finale, Graphire Music Press ... all (and hundreds of other programs and advanced plugins) are wonderful and flexible PC software. Finale and Graphire both started on Macs, and Finale's first PC port was terrible. But once they started writing from the ground up for PC, the results were stunning. And according to users on both platforms, the Graphire PC version leaves the Mac version behind for ease and speed of use.

As for professional results, legacy studios with Mac equipment do not a case for Macs make. My CD was produced with PCs alone, as have been thousands of others. Likewise, as an editor and book designer, I have had no trouble accommodating the needs of legacy print houses who still use Macs.

I have no problem with Macs and those who love them, but you are presenting a bogus argument from the computer world of a decade past.

Dennis

MaltedMedia
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar
Erzsébet the Vampire

Approaching the problem from the other side, I'm becoming increasingly swayed by the benefits of Variable Bit Rate as a way to improve the quality at the recording side. It only goes so far, of course, but I am hearing an audible difference.

I use (and heartily recommend) CDex as my CD-Ripper, and it is now supplied with the Lame encoder. The latest CDex supports VBR, where you can set a) the lowest bit rate you will accept, and b) a general quality tradeoff parameter, where "VBR0" is the least, and "VBR9" the most compromised in quality. I'm hearing better results with this setup than I did with Steinberg WaveLab 3's VBR system, and it's also allowing WinAMP to show the correct songlength, rather than fluctuating as the bitrate changes.

In effect, the VBR system analyses each audio block and makes a guess as to how much information it can drop. If you convert the resulting file back to WAV and examine in CoolEdit Spectral View, you can actually see the high-end cutoff stepping up and down as the bitrate varies. Noisy sounds such as cymbal splashes get the most bandwidth, while smoother sounds allow a lower rate to be used.

The resulting files are larger, but you could tradeoff more quality to get the size down. With the parameters I use ("VBR0", no less than 96kb/s), the bit rates shoot up to 320kb/s at times, and the average compression ratio is only about 8:1. Still, I think the results are worth it...