Text 12435, 76 rader
Skriven 2009-02-16 17:47:26 av Maurice Kinal (1:261/38)
     Kommentar till en text av Russell Tiedt
Ärende: today you make the scene all day
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Hey Russell!

> 320kbps vbr is the prefered setting for mp3, and 500kbps vbr for ogg

I'll keep that in mind but so far am leaning towards the internal ogg/vorbis
default settings on ecasound.  Far less grief with much better results as far
as my ears tell me.  Using a 48000 Hz sample rate for that at the moment but
might drop it down to 44.1 kHz just in case some crippled audio players (eg the
defaut one M$ thinks the crows require) have compatibilty issues.  I noticed
some software installers aimed at the Windows crowd use off encoded sound as
the default, although at a far less sample rate - 12 kHz is the norm which
makes sense given the purpose.

> Good, I hope the RIAA phono stage matches the cartridge you have
> on ye olde turntable ...

Yeppers!  Given that is what the preamp was intended for then it worked out
perfectly.  Had to encorporate a rca <-> minjack cable to output it to the
Revolution though.  Your Audiophile 192 wouldn't require the special cable but
would still need the preamp.

> Mmm ... , talking of filtering abilities, does ecasound have the
> ability to encode audio using variable bit rates, or would one have
> to fix the encoding "scheme" required in the encoders own "settings"
> file ... ?

Yes for both.  If piping then you could just use the app's switches to control
bitrates etc.  If we're talking ogg/vorbis then I seem to prefer letting
ecasound take care of all this rather than piping it to vorbis-tools' oggenc. 
lame is still an issue here but piping output to lame and using it's settings
seems to work better at the moment. However ecasound's internalized ogg/vorbis
seems to produce the best results comparitively speaking, all else being equal.

Personally I seem to prefer the flac or wav formats when listening. Speaking of
which, sndfile's flac encoding saves about 20% on diskspace compared to
straight flac but costs more in processing.  wav definetly costs more in disk
space but costs the least in processing.  All three compare in what I hear
quality-wise.  For conversion to other formats, wav wins especially in
processing costs and simplicity of usage. Definetly would be easier to script
and/or robotize.  Capturing from a turntable is best left to a somewhat
scripted interactive session no matter what format and switches required to
produce the end result. I am currently thinking that wav wins for the
'original' stored files and use that to create whatever
reformat/resampled/filtered targetted file.

Keeping it simple always seems to win in the end.

> As I understand it, you could have used a chain ... to "monitor"
> the sound recording ... , tho I have yet to do so myself ...

Same here.  There are a bunch of tools within ecasound that I have yet to get a
grasp on.  The idea I employed nicely kickstarted my first venture into this
and might turn out to be the preffered method from capturing from an external
device such as a tape deck or turntable. Continuously montitoring to a
headphone on a seperate session allowed me to start/stop the recording session
without having to reload the monitoring session.  This way I could play around
with changing albums, moving the arm to different songs, edit the output
filename(s) etc. and not have to restart the monitoring seesion.  Also the
monitoring seesion could be used just to play records to the headphones or
speckers just like mom used to do ... before she got into digital mastering
that is.  ;-)

> Hmmm ... , is the sound card setup that way ... , i.e. is that
> harwired, or can you change that ... ?

I can change it via alsamixer.  It'll do up to and including 192 kHz. The
Audiophile 192 should be the same.

48000Hz is default for DAT Tape, whereas 41000Hz is default for CD ...


Life is good,
Maurice

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