After reading Harish Venugopal’s article (JAM, Oct 30-Nov 14) on saving your old audio cassettes, I did a bit of experimenting with my PC and my sound system, and managed to do everything from recording the music in games like Q3Arena and saving songs from live radio to my PC. In essence, you can save and mix songs in and from both your sound system and your PC. Here’s how:
1) Basic Hardware: You’ll need an auxiliary wire (that is what you should ask for at the hardware store). It should cost around fifteen to twenty bucks. One end will have the walkman-earphone plug type pin, and the other end should be split into two pins with flower-petals like thingies, and a protruding central plug. You’ll recognize it when you see it. If the guy at the store seems confused ask for the wire used to connect the TV to a sound system. You’ll also need a wire with the earphone-pins at BOTH ends. This is a difficult one to find. Try Manish Market near CST, or make your own using those earphone-pins (3 bucks each) and about one meter of wire (2 bucks). Solder one pin at one end, and the other at the other, and you are ready.
Your deck or sound system should ideally have an auxiliary input at the back, an earphone output in the front, and a karaoke input (if you don’t know, this is where your mic plugs in), also in the front. The PC has a mic input, and a sound output at the back of your CPU. They will have icons to help you out.
2) Getting stuff done:
I. To record sound from your PC in your sound system: Use the Auxiliary wire, plug one end to the aux input at the back of the sound system, and the other in the output of the CPU. Now press the AUX button on your sound system. Don’t worry, it’s sure to be there, check in the manual if you don’t find it. Now, any sound that will pass through your comp’s sound, will come out through the sound system’s speakers. Put in a blank cassette, punch the rec key, and you got your mp3’s, cool game music, songs you downloaded from the net et cetera on your audiocassette.
II. To record sound from the sound system in your PC: OK, take the wire with the earphone-pins at both ends and plug in one end to the earphone output of the sound system, and the other to the mic input of your CPU. Start a recording software (more about this discussed later), and you are ready to go. Anything that you play on your sound system can be recorded on the comp. CDs, tapes, radio included. Record whatever you want, and save it.
III. More fun things to do: Plug in the comp’s output to the sound system’s karaoke input (or mic input) and, at the same time play any song on the tape or CD player. Start playing a game. Viola! You have the game music mixed in live with the music from your sound system! FPS and racing games work great. The shooting sounds, and the car’s engine give great SFX. Shove in a cassette in the sound system, and you can record all the sound! Want to see how you are as a radio jockey? Plug in a mike at any input, and jockey away. Again, you can record whatever you do.
3) Software: Searched the web like hell and still couldn’t find goldwave 4.25, as suggested by Harish Venugopal. All I ended up was with a demo version of goldwave 5, which is good, but a bit complicated for me. It suddenly expired, doesn’t save a thing, and kept reminding me to purchase it every five minutes. So sound recorder, already sitting in windows (start>programs>accessories>entertainment>sound recorder) is the best for basic recording, although you have to be very alert and keep pressing the rec button every sixty seconds, but it gives you good quality. Try the DivX software from www.divx.com, if you are not satisfied with sound recorder. For conversions from any format to any format, I recommend Bink and Smacker’s Rad video tools from www.radgametools.com/bnkmain.htm. If you don’t like it, look around for wav to mp3 and vice-versa software in www.mp3-to-wav.net, mp3sofwares.com or micosoft.com For making your own remixes (exciting na?) trust me, you won’t find anything better than MixVibes Free from www.mixvibes.com. For more resources, try download.cnet.com’s sound/audio section or www.sonicspot.com.
A neat way to save all your sound files is to burn it using something like the Nero software. If you don’t have a CD writer, say goodbye to all that free hardrive space on your system, sounds take a LOT of space. Unless.. you record all your audio back onto the good old cassettes. The funny thing is, we’re back at where we started.
