Cool edit?

[David P. Schwartz]

Rick Rosinski wrote:

> Well, I have found some sound file editors now.  Xsox looks good.
> I can't find cool edit.  Tried sourceforge, freshmeat, and linuxlinks.com.
> Do you know the url?

CoolEdit runs on Windoze.  You can find CoolEdit at:  http://www.syntrillium.com
They're actually located right here in Scottsburg.  (FYI: my sound editing tool of choice is CoolEdit Pro.)

The "industry standard" in recording software is called "Pro Tools", made by Digidesign.  They recently posted a "freebie" version of
their software on their web site.  It's a slimmed-down version of their regular product.  http://www.digidesign.com/

> Do you know of a program that I can use to simply merge two wav files?  I
> don't mean mixing them together,

yes, you do.  You just don't know it yet...

> I mean appending one large wave file to
> another large wave file.  I am putting my cassettes into mp3 format, and I
> want to merge both sides of each cassette into one larget mp3 file.

Do you understand the term, "Ahhhh, spare me the details my friend.  After all, it's only a small matter of programming (before we take
over the Space Shuttle's telemetry and ground control system)..."?

First, you've got to get the music from the tapes into your computer.  When you digitize it, you'll hear stuff you never heard on your
cassette player.  It'll make you want to throw up if you listen to it in a good pair of headphones.  Then there's the matter of the
noise generated by the a-to-d converters -- most cheap sound cards (and esp. sound chips in laptops) add their own "color", not to
mention hiss.  Good cards and external converters are available, though.

Now, once you've got the files digitized, you'll need to mix them.  You cannot just cat them together -- that's like trying to cat the
executable files "ls" and "less" together to simulate a pipe command!  You'll have about the same result.  Sound files have headers
inside them.  They also have a distinct internal structure.  (Even so-called "raw" files have a structure; what makes them "raw" is
they're missing their headers, so you have to figure out what their sampling rate, blocking, bits-per-word, and number of channels might
be before you can get anything intelligible out of them.)

What you want to do here is called "mixing", even if it _does_ look like a 'cat' command. :-)

If these cassettes of yours are commercially produced (ie., the garbage the major labels sell at the music store), then not only will
they have very low fidelity and saturation (ie, the playback levels will be low and need to be raised), but their signal-to-noise (s/n)
ratio will be very high -- especially if they've got Dolby NR on them.  Your sound editing software will need to compensate for that
(unless you've got a good player with the same kind of Dolby as was used on the recording), as well as the A-law or u-law EQ biasing
that might be present in the recording to compensate for the inherent bias of the type of recording tape they used.  And remember, when
you amplify sounds digitally, you're amplifying EVERYTHING -- signal, noise, bleedthrough, everything.  So you'll want to apply some
noise reduction first BEFORE amplifying.

Then you need to pick an MP3 encoder and a good encoding rate, which will take some trial-and-error....

All that said, there's a HUGE debate going on within the audio recording industry about what the next standard recording format should
be that will supercede the CD format (44.1 kHz, 16 bits, 2 channels).  Given the incredible "success" of services like Napster that are
fueled by people plugging their Walkman into their computer and recording the output direct-to-MP3 format, it's amazing anybody is even
concerned!  The fidelity of cassette-to-MP3 is somewhere between AM radio and shortwave radio.  People consider this "state of the
art".  Nobody will even notice the difference that 96 kHz, 24 bits, 5.1 surround THX encoding has over this if they think this is about
the same as "CD quality"...

-David Schwartz

FYI: a few years ago, I got so frustrated just trying to record some simple chimes so they didn't end up sounding like glass breaking or
Mack trucks crashing (seriously!) that I attended a recording school in Tempe for 18 weeks.  Hey, I know how to record chimes now and
end up with something that sounds fairly realistic!