You can steal music, but you can't record your own??

In My Humble Opinion
1

Last year my friend Kate went to a high-end sound shop to buy some gear for doing freelance field interviews for radio. I was with her. The sales guy gave her a very friendly elaborate pitch and got her to spend about $600 on a Sony NetMD digital recorder, a fancy microphone, and SoundForge software. The idea was (I was there, and this is what we both got out of it) that she could take this little gizmo with her out and about, plug in her microphone, record interviews with people, and then plug in the Sony via USB to her laptop or computer, copy the sound file to the computer, edit it in SoundForge, and be on her merry way. Cool!

About a year later I wanted to record a song as a gift for another friend. I asked Kate if she’d bring her little recording toy and play guitar while I sang. No problem – she hadn’t used it much, but she was pretty sure it would work. We recorded our song, and then tried to download it to my computer, but no dice. Well, she didn’t bring the software with her, and maybe we needed that. Fine, she’d try it at home.

Now Kate is not the MOST computer-savvy person in the world, but she does manage to fumble around with the basics. Nevertheless, she could not seem to figure out how to get this file copied to the computer and burned to CD. I would have helped her, but in the meantime she had moved across the country, so I didn’t have access to the equipment.

Time passed and passed, and I was starting to get frustrated, and ready to give up on the recording I made with Kate. So I went to another musical friend, Dave, for help. He has a microphone and a four-track recorder of some kind. I gave him the music to look over, and we’re going to get together in the next week or so.

Meanwhile Mr. S and I started trying to think of ways we could get this thing recorded ourselves. Last weekend we took a trip around the city looking for our own recording device. We found lots of MP3 PLAYERS, digital recorders WITH NO MIC JACK, fancy boomboxes WITH NO MIC JACK, and karaoke machines. There were also some cheap-ass tabletop tape recorders at Radio Shack. (And digital recorders for taping lectures and such; we tried one and the sound was for shit.) Or we could blow a few hundred bucks on a fancy multi-track mixing board. WTF???

Anyway, after a very frustrating day, we got home and discovered that our stereo has a karaoke function on it. By cheating and setting the source music to “nothing,” you can record to tape. Then you can set your recorded tape as the source and record again, essentially creating a two-track recorder. So we’ll try that.

But WTF??? Remember when we (by “we” I mean people who were kids in the 60’s and 70’s) used to screw around with our tape recorders, making plays and singing songs and so on? It was so easy: (Optional Step 1) Plug in microphone. (Step 2) Insert tape. (Step 3) Press “Record.”

What the hell happened???

Then Kate finally called. She had been through tech support HELL only to find out that the Sony NetMD recorder WILL NOT DO what she was told it would do. YOU CAN’T transfer music from the recorder to the computer – IT’S A ONE-WAY CONNECTION. The thing is designed for ripping music off CDS and moving them to the recorder for playback. She went to the Sony user forums, only to find out that SONY IS SHUTTING THEM DOWN because they’re tired of dealing with pissed-off people. So she spent $600 for nothing.

Needless to say, she is going to burn a hole in the butt of the guy who sold her this thing.

SO HOW THE HELL do people, as in non-professional musicians, just record stuff at home anymore? Do we not have the technology? Is there NO WAY to simply plug in a microphone and hit “record” anymore? Yes, I can use my stereo for my current project, but only by futzing with the stupid karaoke function. And it’s not exactly portable, if I want to record somewhere besides my living room. We have zillions of cheap, portable MP3 players for downloading music from the Net and from CDs, and we have file-sharing services up the wazoo. Why can this technology not be used to make new music without renting a recording studio?

We went to all kinds of stores – Best Buy, stereo shops, music stores – and every salesman essentially told us that we have all kinds of ways to rip off music from professional recordings, but no easy way to create our own. Unless we want to spend hundreds of dollars on way more gadgetry than we need.

Musicians, sound techs: What the hell? Am I missing something? Please tell me I am missing something. This is insane.

2

Just plug a microphone into the audio input into your computer. I record my guitar like that, and it sounds alright. I only use a cheap mic and some cheap software, but I’ve made music that sounds pretty good.

(I’m pretty sure there is a way to put MD recorded sound onto a computer. I seem to recall something about that in a broadcast journalism class I did, but I can’t remember any of the specifics. Perhaps the difficulty is unique to the NetMD.)

3

As stated by gex gex, you can plug a mic into your sound card. If you click on its icon in the systray, it will almost certainly have come with recording software. You will have to check the box in Windows Mixer to record from the mic input. This will get you one mono or stereo recording. If you want to do overdubs, it is more complicated and it becomes necessary to have multitrack software, none of which is cheap.

You might check with the musical instrument stores in your area. Perhaps they will rent you a 4-track mixer/recorder and a decent mic. It’d be a lot less expensive to do it this way, if you’re only going to record occasionally. If you want to start taking it seriously, you will have to take the plunge and get the software and the devices to connect your instruments and microphones to the computer - $$$$!

4

It appears that Sony is the culprit. My friend went to the Sony Musiclub user forums and found lots of similar complaints to hers. A few people have mentioned a possible way to do it by connecting line-out on the NetMD to line-in on a computer. I don’t know if my friend has tried it. But there are a lot of pissed-off people on the Sony board for this very reason, and Sony is shutting down the board at the end of April. Nice.

So I have to either record here in my office ( :rolleyes: ) or haul a laptop around, huh? Or shell out (either rental or purchase) for professional equipment with all the bells and whistles? Boy, that sucks. I sure miss the old days. It seems to me that digital recording manufacturers are missing out on a large market here. Why the hell can’t they make the NetMD USB connection go both ways? (Rhetorical question – I know that the “answer” is copy protection/bootlegging, but that’s a load of crap.)

5

You don’t have to get anything fancy to record your own music on your computer. A while back I needed to get a replacement disc from Dell and along with the disk they sent a length of phone chord and a cheap mic. And you know it has to be cheap if they just send them to people. You can pick them up at a Staples for about 12-20 dollars.

If you want to do multi-track recording your best bet is to get some kind of music editing software like Cakewalk (pc) or AudioDesk (Mac). Cakewalk is relatively cheap but I don’t know much about AudioDesk…except from my experience with it, it’ll probably set you back a good bit more.

I have Cakewalk Music Creator 2002 and I’ve used it to make multi-track recordings with my el-cheapo mic and I thought it sounded alright.

Granted, it’s not as nice as what you can produce with the ‘right’ equipment, but for a set-up that should cost less than a hundred dollars, it’s not bad at all.

6

Grumbles… well that link won’t work, but this one should:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00006F7TZ/qid=1081268067/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2_etk-software/104-4181866-8197536?v=glance&s=software&n=229534

7

For music editing software I think Sound Forge is the best. Your friend made a good buy there but that Sony gismo sounds like it wasn’t what she was looking for at all. You can just plug mic into audio input socket in sound card and record. If you could afford to buy a cheap, secondhand four-track recorder and ran the mic through that before inputting into the sound card the quality would be better but you can clean the sound up a little with the editing software as well (though as every sound engineer knows you should aim for the best quality sound you can get to begin with before editing…)
Anyway - basically what the others said. Or you could just use a mini disc player and a decent mic.

8
      • Ummmm… -regarding minidisc recorders:
        —> Apparently this person was sold one that will not do portable recording, which is what she really wanted, and which quite plainly is a bummer. If this was a shifty salesperson or a case of wrong terminology we can’t quite know now, but no minidisc recorders will allow moving sound files backwards (from minidisc player->to->PC) through the netMD connection, and furthermore, none ever have. Early MD recorders had a line-in to record on, and a headphone jack to get sound back out. Newer ones do high-speed transfers through their NetMD connections, but that is only one-way. The ONLY way you can really transfer a sound file off a minidisc is to route the audio output to a line-in input. You really don’t lose any quality doing this however–a MD recording transferred to a computer line-input this way still sounds clean and crystal-clear.
        —> You can however still buy minidisc recorders that will do portable recording. You do have to look for ones that specifically say that they have a mic jack, because most don’t–with most, it is assumed that you will load music files onto the minidisc player from your computer, and then just play them on the minidisc player.
        Two I found right off:
        http://www.planetminidisc.com/mz-n10.html
        http://www.planetminidisc.com/mz-nf810ck.html
  • Minidisc recorders do sound very nice, but shopping is confusing because they were never really accepted among amateur recording afficianados, even though the sound quality is very very close to a CD, but for a lot less money. Mine is about 5? yrs old now and I think it was the last one for the US market that has both a line-in and a mic jack; I bought it right before all the NetMD ones came out. Nowadays (in the US at least) you are pretty much reduced to online shopping; a local chain electronics store carries a couple newer MD players but they don’t do portable recording. One practical problems I found with mine however is that for recording, the included rechargeable NimH AA battery is nearly worthless–it only gives about 45 minutes of good recording, and that’s on a fresh recharge. For portable recording, alkaline disposeable batteries work quite a bit longer, but ideally, you want to plug thi thing into a wall socket. It will record for a couple hours off of any battery, but after so long, the sound quality goes down the toilet.
    http://www.planetminidisc.com/index.html (online retailer)
    http://www.minidisc.org/minidisc_faq.html (general FAQ)
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9

Yeah, those are very similar to the one she has, and that’s exactly what we did – plugged her fancy mic into the unit’s mic jack and recorded away. But the only way to listen to it is on the NetMD unit – not much use if you want to distribute YOUR OWN RECORDING to other people. I’ll see if Kate has tried the analog transfer.

That CakeWalk software doesn’t look so bad either.

For the short-term, I’ll just futz with the karaoke business – this recording was supposed to be a Christmas present!

I still miss the old, easy way though. Thanks, everyone, for your input.

10

He’s probably already got one. Most people do. :slight_smile:

Er… sorry. That’s all I have to add which hasn’t already been said.

11
      • That is the way to do it: to record on a minidisc unit, you use a mic plugged into the mic jack, right? And that records the sounds onto a minidisk.
        Okay.
  • Now, to transfer that recorded audio to anything else, you get a 3.5mm patch cable (a cable with 3.5mm stereo jacks on both ends, try to get a short one–two feet is good, 3 feet at the longest! -->don’t get a 6-footer or longer!) and plug one end into the minidisk’s headphone jack, and you plug the other end into the line-in of any other recording device. Such as a computer’s sound card. Then you 1) start the computer recording from the line-in input, and 2) press play on the minidisk. And, whatever is playing on the mindisk player, gets recorded onto the computer (or tape deck, or whatever). That’s it. That’s the way it is done. It’s the only way it can be done. The patch cable shouldn’t cost more than $3 online, $7 at Radio Shack.
    …
    Now if she had wanted to hook up the thing directly to her computer through the NetMD and transfer the songs off the minidisk back into the computer, what I’m trying to explain here is that don’t work. It hasn’t ever worked, with any minidisk player ever sold. NetMD is only for moving songs FROM the computer TO the minidisk player–not the other way! The only devices that have ever been able to make DIRECT minidisk copies were a couple models of pro-studio-level Sony decks. Everybody else uses audio-out transfer for their minidisk recording. Don’t worry about any major sound-quality dive from this, there isn’t one if you use shielded cables, and even $3 cables now have RF shielding.

By the by, if you want longer cables, you have to make them using THICKER WIRE. LIke, get a 20-amp extension cord, and cut off the regular ends, and put 3.5mm jacks on it. Minidisk mics are high-impedance mics that lose treble if you run them over long and very-thin cables. And if her mic sounds poor, there’s a place online named Microphone Madness that makes/sells some very good mini-mics. Lots of other places sell these same mics, but this is the place that makes them.
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