Recording Tips

Recording your voice or a sound effect is usually fun and easy. But if you want to get the best transfer of a tape or LP to your computer, or record your garage band, you'll find that recording can be more difficult than it first appears. The pages listed here contain many useful tips.

Related article(s): General Recording Tips Transferring tapes and records to computer or CD - Illustrated Tutorial

Necessities for a good recording to computer:

• Appropriate hardware for the quality you want to record at - including sound devices, connecting cables, microphones...
• Appropriate, up-to-date drivers for your hardware, especially your sound device
• Properly managed computer resources - you need sufficient processing power to record the waveform without dropouts or skips
• Testing the input level before you record for real

• Troubleshooting Recordings - identifying symptoms of recording problems and fixing them

• Connecting your Equipment - connections to HI-FI, radios and other sources

• Improving Recording Quality

• Reducing noise

• Removing Artifacts

• Synchronizing Tracks

• Speech Recording

• Recording from Cassette

• Multichannel Recording

• Recording length

• Timed Recording

• Some basic hints on how to set up a Ad Hoc Recording Studio

• Choosing the most appropriate Sample Rate and Bit Depth