I am trying to convert some audio tapes (speach and music) into wav files and am having a bear of a time. The sound recorder that came w/ windows stops after 60 seconds. I have tryed to download some free/shareware. But what I have found is: 1 it is limited to 45 seconds due to crippleware and 2 it does not record as I want - when I try to recoed speach and there is a pause it thinks it’s a new track and pauses causing broken speach.
I have got the soundblastewr recorder/mixer which came w/ my soundcard an it is having trouble w/ the 100+ mb files.
100+MB??? How long are these songs? Over 10 minutes? I use creative’s Wave Studio, which is crap, but it does the job. I’d like to get hold of a decent audio program like SoundForge. Anyway, whatever you do, DON’T try to record a whole tape to one file, which is what it sounds like you might be doing, given the large size. Of course, you might just be converting long things like classical pieces or something. Anyway, if you have a decent program, just make sure you have lots of RAM and plenty of hard drive space. You should have at least 128MB to deal with the average 45MB sound file that you might be doing.
I just recently recorded a CD for my parents from a VERY old tape of my Grandmother singing the Messiah. Recorded every track as a separate file, then filtered all the pops and hisses out with my CD-R program (WinOnCD PE). A good sound editing program will have these features built in, but mine sucks. Check out Sound Forge.
If it is speech then you can get away with dropping the sampling settings. Try recording in mono, 22khz 8-bit, or even 11khz if you’re desperate. There will be a noticeable loss of sound quality but for speech it probably won’t matter.
I was able to get the most important 2 tapes to a wav file then onto a cd - what a pain in the @$$. It was recorded in stereo so I didn’t want to drop it down, nor the audio quality.