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Getting It In: Audio InputBy Francine Schwieder |
As your brand new Mac comes out of its box, there is no way to get sound into it from anything other than a CD or a video camera. You'll have to buy something. But if you have an older Mac there will be several ways to get sound recorded from your old LPs/audio tapes/video tapes/the party going on/whatever. The simplest, and probably most universal, is the microphone-in jack or even a built-in mircrophone. Plug in the microphone if necessary and start the party. You might have built-in RCA audio and video jacks. Plug your equipment into the appropriate holes and you're in business.
My 8600, running OS 9, has the requisite jacks, so I plugged in cables from the audio out jacks of my amplifier, with the turntable attached to the amp, to the audio in jacks of the Mac. Next I went to the Sound control panel, clicked on Input, and selected RCA In as the Input Source (if you are using a microphone, select that). Next launch Apple's own SimpleSound program, which, if you haven't moved stuff around, will be in the Apple Extras folder. The program looks pretty primitive, but it works just fine. When you launch it a window opens about alert sounds. Close it, and go to the Sound menu, and select the quality you want. If your source is playing stereo you will want CD quality, but if it is in mono then Music quality will probably be fine (and the files will be much smaller). Now go to the File menu and select New. A dinky little control window will open. It doesn't look like much, but will do everything you need. It has Record, Stop, Pause and Play buttons, a little speaker icon which will show miniature sound waves when something starts coming through to it, a progress bar which will show the length of time the recording has gone on, and underneath just how much time you can use for a recording. This depends on the amount of free space on your hard drive. If you have about 1 gigabyte of free space you can record about 2 hours of sound at the CD quality level. Yeah, uncompressed sound files take up a lot of space. There are also buttons for Cancel and Save. That's it.
I clicked the Record button and put the needle to the vinyl. It started to play. There seemed to be an awful lot of hum. When the first track finished I hit the Stop button, then clicked Save. Then I played my first LP track. There was a horrible amount of hum. Some experimenting led me to discover the following: (1) you want to use connecting cables that are as short as possible; (2) avoid having any cable pass near your monitor; (3) be sure your turntable is grounded to the amplifier and that the amplifier is grounded to the Mac. I accomplished this last by running a wire the same gauge as the turntable ground wire from the grounding post on the back of the amp to a vacant monitor screw hole (you know, where you tighten the monitor plug on the back of your Mac). I used a spare screw thingy to secure the ground wire. If you need help grounding I suggest you talk to someone who actually knows something about electricity, although my own "consultant" took a dim view of my solution. At any rate, this solved the problem. I proceeded to record all of my Pete Seeger albums. I made each side into a single "track" and then had iTunes import them as MP3 files. I then made a single MP3 CD, containing 8 albums, 200MBs of files, and a playing time of about 6 hours. For information on how to use iTunes to do this, see the previous article.
Recording my audio tapes was even easier. I carted my tape deck over to the Mac, used a really short set of RCA-jack equipped cables to connect the audio out of the tape deck to the audio in jacks of the Mac, launched SimpleSound, clicked record, pressed the Play button on the tape deck and 45 minutes later hit Stop and Save. I suppose, since this was not grounded at all, there is a bit of hum, but at the listening levels I use it is not very noticeable. I filled an MP3 CD with audio tapes: playing time 8 and half hours. Pop it into your MP3 player or the Mac and listen to your own musical selections all day long.
The situation with the new Macs requires a bit of extra investment, especially if you are running OS X. I bought the shareware program Sound Studio, $50 spent online at Kagi. I then ordered the Griffin iMic online, $35 plus $5 shipping. If you want to record in OS 9 you will only need the iMic (which you might win in this month's raffle) and you will be able to use SimpleSound to record. But you'll need to get some sort of program to record in OS X. Sound Studio lets you do all sorts of cool stuff, like fade ins and fade outs, as well as record. Have fun!