Okay, all of my wires are hooked up, and I'm ready to record. The question is, what software am I going to use to record my music? There are basically two kinds of software to use. The first type has a recording level vue meter, which will bounce up and down according to the recording volume, and the second type also has a visual display that will display the waveform for both channels as it records. In both of these cases, it is important to note that it is the soundcard that is actually doing the muscle-work of turning the analog input soundwaves into their digital equivalents, so that provided the recording software does not screw that process up too badly, the results of the recording will be similar with various softwares.
Now, as to which type of software is best, I much prefer recording software that gives you a visual display as it records. This sort of recording software is commonly a feature of the wave-editor or record-restoration application you may have purchased. It's really nice to kick back with an iced tea or a brew or whatever and watch the waveform bounce along as you listen to the music. Besides, by actually seeing the waveform develop, it is very easy to see when the recording level is too high (when the top of the waveform starts to flatten out as it reaches the 0 decibel level). However, I have discovered that recording with the visual display turned on uses an awful lot of computing power (i.e., system resources), and if your computer is not powerful enough, you can wind up with occasional drop-outs that sound like very brief but nevertheless annoying "skips," as if a split second of sound had been deleted. (I have measured these drop-outs and found them to average just over a tenth of a second in length--just enough to cause a nagging suspicion that something just went wrong. At first I thought it was just a figment of my imagination.) Well, it turned out that my recording computer, with its 500 Mhz processor and 256 megs of memory, is not quite powerful enough to handle recording with the visual display going: occasionally I will get drop-outs, though sometimes I can record an entire LP without any problem. It happens just often enough to make it frustrating, so that now I consistently use recording software without the visual display. I commonly use the little "Creative" recorder software that came with my soundcard. Another good choice is the shareware product "Total Recorder." But there are many, many others. If you have a powerful computer, by all means use software with the visual display--it's much more fun. On the other hand, if your system resources are limited, it stands to reason that your recording software should not be running any extra bells and whistles. Moreover, you should disable your wireless connection and any other processes that may be running before you record. Even if you have a powerful new computer, multitasking while recording is inviting trouble--and the trouble will most likely take the form of barely noticeable drop-outs.
The important thing, in fact, the way-important thing, is to make sure that your recording level is not too high. When I used to record my records onto cassette tapes, I would try to set the recording level as high as possible without distortion. If I used chrome or metal dioxide tape, I could let the vue meters bounce around in the red and still get good recordings. I wanted to see those meters bouncing around at the high end of the scale. When I first approached digital recording on the computer, I had made so many thousands of cassette tapes, that this habit was hard to break. I had the impulse to want to record at as high a level as possible. I soon learned that recording "in the red," or even "in the orange," was a sure prescription for digital distortion. Moreover, it was pointless, since once a good digital recording is made at modest middle range recording levels, it is a simple matter to later jack it up right to the threshold of distortion. So what does distortion sound like? Well, to me digital distortion sounds kind of "rattly," particularly when a human voice is distorted. As a matter of convention, software vue meters are generally set up so that the "0" level designates the distortion threshold. But I have found that in many cases distortion can begin significantly below that. The normal recording range is sometimes said to be between -3 and 0, but when the meter gets above -1, watch out. Other vue meters are simply color coded, and I interpret the color readings as follows: Red--Very Bad; Orange--Bad; Yellow--Caution; Green--Okay.
Now the final recording level that you see in the vue meter is determined by two things: the actual volume of the signal coming into the sound card, and the adjustment slider on your recording software. If the volume coming into the soundcard is way high, like from a headphones jack with the volume turned up to 11, it will not only overload the soundcard's input but, according to some authorities on the subject, may actually physically damage the soundcard. If you can adjust the volume level coming into your soundcard, start with a low level and work your way up from there. Of course, if you are using a non-adjustable input source, like from an amp's "record" jacks intended for use with a cassette recorder, all of your volume adjustments will necessarily center on the recording software. And, as I mentioned in the previous page on "Hooking-Up," even the volume level coming from your amp's cassette "record" jacks may be too high, and you may have to resort to hooking up a connection to your headphones jack.
In any case, this stage of setting a recording level that will not cause digital distortion is so important that it is worth whatever effort you put into getting it right. And although it may be a bother at first, once you hit on the right combination, you can go on using it for every subsequent project. It is important to note that digital distortion resulting from excessive recording volume is one problem that cannot be easily corrected later on by editing. It will ruin your recording at the outset, so that all of the later effort you put into removing noise and clicks and pops will be time wasted.
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