Throwing myself at your mercy ...

[blues-hacker]

now that I've finally gotten into the 20th century and figured out how to convert to MP3 off a CD.... (yeah, I know I'm still a century behind...)

Posted over at: http://baz.perlmonk.org/main.cgi

I put up 2 songs, and related recording info -

Thrill is Gone is from material I was collecting for a band demo

Little Wing is what I think of as a happy accident, I was playing around setting up and learning my new console and tape deck. Had a mic close on the amp, and a room mic (Rode NT1) that was actually behind my right shoulder... couldn't beleive it picked up the vocal as well as it did.... not that I can really sing, but....

Anyways, learning process. First time I took something from creation, to tape, to digital/ CD, and then to MP3. Looking back, I guess I'm not wild about MP3 format loss. Using CDex as an encoder. Is there a better way?

any comments welcome.

b-h

 

[blues-hacker]

many apologies !

didn't mean to triple post - kept getting an "unable to connect to server" meassage.... even hit refresh on the main page to see if it had gone thru before I tried resending....

sorry -

admin - please feel free to blow away the dupes

b-h

 

[Track Rat]

I checked out Little Wing (Derek and the Dominos does my favorite cover). You're getting a decent tone off the amp. You definately have the machine too close to the mic. I hear the reel flanges scrubbing the tape. Well my friend, first your guitar is a bit out of tune. And you solo way too long (1:20) before you get to the melody and identify what song you're doing. On the vocal, and sounds like you too far from the mic or something. I hear too much of the room in the mic.

 

[Lt. Bob]

I caught both tunes. On both of them there is far too much room sound. That's to be expected I guess considering how you did them but it's something you want to work on.
Little Wing....Track Rat has it right.....way too long of an intro, especially when it's repetitious. Also.....solos don't work real well when there's absolutely no accompianment. You'd be better served by playing some sort of rhythm in stead and a lot less of it.
Thrill Is Gone......not a very good sound at all. The drums sound distant and there are timing problems galore.

This is a starting point for you so please don't take these comments too seriously. We all get them when we first start. But these are things that can be corrected and I look forward to hearing you progress.
Oh....and use your tuner moer frequently.

 

[blues-hacker]

Damn, this site is getting almost impossible to get into, time-out after time out.... definitely has server issues...

appreciate the input, wasn't worried about the style content/quality, more on the recording/ conversion and perceived MP3 loss, and as I said, on Wing, the room mic was actually behind my back, and only about a foot and a half away from the tape deck - so yeah, you could say the vocal was a little "airy"

so - lessons learned-
the tape scrubbing noise was clear on the tape, and on the burned CD, and almost completely disappeared on my computer when listening back to the MP3. This was the first time I did a record process all the way thru to MP3, so I was beleiving it was conversion loss - the fact that you guys heard it so clearly tells me it's not in the conversion, it's in my computer sound card/speakers - cool.... now I just gotta find a way to make sure I can hear back out what I put in, when I go to computer land

too much "room" - for band practices and jams I've always set one mic at the back of the room, specifically to get a room sound, as until just recently I didn't have any reverb unit for recording. So Thrill had no reverb other than that room mic input, and Wing did have outboard reverb added - which I thought might be a touch heavy - but then I think more as a player who is used to the live room sound. Personnally I think most CD's sound too dry, as opposed to live performance sound, but I guess it's time to put on a new hat.

Anyways, thanks for the input

b-h

 

[Pinky]

Analog is tough to convert down to mp3 cleanly without having to create very large, high bitrate mp3 files... which is what I'm afraid you'll have to do here. Variable bitrate will help you some, but you'll likely have to encode at 192 or 224 kbps.