there that will play / record wav and MP3 files, play your audio CDs and MIDI files, and equalize audio sig- nals. The Black Diamond Music Master 2 is one of.
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Bernard Y LOCAL HI- FI DEALER tells me that turntable sales are on the increase! Ok, they’re not booming in sales or anything, but he has seen an increase. I’ve also noticed more questions about LP-to-CD recording in audio newsgroups. Sony seems to have noticed as well, being now the first audio hardware company to come out with a “kit” to record LPs and Cassettes for CD burning. As it turns out, Sony has done a nice job and made the whole thing more competitive. All the programs reviewed here have a list price of less than $50, so there’s no economic excuse for not recording your LPs onto CDs. Despite the low prices, these programs offer a number of worthwhile features and make audio recording fairly easy. None of the programs require excessive computer resources; an old Pentium computer, which might be considered a dinosaur, can still be used with them. Sony claims it can run on a Pentium 133. Even intense processing required only six per cent of the CPU power of my Athlon 700 processor. For this round of software tests, I decided to rely primarily on several of the same recordings I had used previously. I did this in part so that I could compare results. I know the Odyssey and Don Nix recordings really well and have found some clicks that are easy to remove and others that are almost impossible to get out. A private cassette recording of a public concert served as a test for tape noise reduction. I did my testing on my main
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computer, which uses an Athlon chip, but I also installed all the software on my laptop just to verify it would work with less processing and memory power. Except for the Sony, all of these programs come without a written manual. While they do come with electronic manuals (word or Acrobat pdf format) I think that’s insufficient. I’ll bet not one in 10 customers actually prints out those manuals, given the time, hassle and expense involved. Still, if you do plunk down your money, I strongly recommend that you fire up your printer and get a hard copy. These are complicated programs. Yes, you can do decent recordings without knowing all the tricks, but you will certainly be more informed and versatile in using the program once you have some hard copy instructions in front of you. Unfortunately, many of these programs don’t have their own level controls. Clicking on the level control button often brought up the Microsoft Windows media mixer. Too bad, since I don’t use that, but instead use a much superior control supplied by my soundcard. The meters on the soundcard control panel are better than Windows’ standard controls. In all cases, I was able to bring up the Turtle Beach control panel and use that, though it was annoying to be required to specify that. Ideally, the software should be able to either provide decent meters and level controls or auto-select my default soundcard meters/controls. This lack of detection isn’t a matter of price with software; even the
the audiophile voice
Black Diamond Music Master PRO, $49.00. http://www.soundlabs.com When John Freeman of Black Diamond Sound first told me about MusicMaster Pro, I assumed it was an update. But the original Music Master is still for sale and
the PRO version (at the same price) really does look like a completely different program. The interface is much more attractive and intuitive. Black Diamond has kept $399.00 SoundForge program currently under test for a future issue uses the chincy Windows control. Black Diamond Music Master 2 v2.4, $49.00. http://www.soundlabs.com There are more than a dozen computer programs out there that will play / record wav and MP3 files, play your audio CDs and MIDI files, and equalize audio signals. The Black Diamond Music Master 2 is one of them. I tested Version 2.4 which can be downloaded from its Internet site. Installing it was easy, and I found the program wasn’t difficult to run, though a good help file is included for those new to this. Some of the settings can be retained for future sessions, but others can’t, which can be annoying. Recording is done with the assist of two pairs of meters: An LED-type bar meter and an old-fashioned VU-type meter that has a peak hold setting. I found it easy to record without clipping the sound. Wav files could be converted to MP3 files within the program. There is no processing available except for an equalizer. Competition is fierce in the under $50 software market. Being able to download and try it out before paying money is a big plus, and I would recommend doing that if you plan to compare software packages. Some programs do have better features than others, such as record meters, and your preference for a layout (or “interface”) should be a decisive factor. As it is, I liked both the meters and the interface. I found it easy to use. No, it doesn’t do any serious processing or burning. And perhaps that’s a problem, because at $49.00, it doesn’t offer as much as the competition. But if you want to do some basic recording and playback, the Black Diamond Music Master 2 is worth checking out.
those very nice meters that make monitoring easy. Some visualizations and “skins” were added, but to me, these are simply distractions, and perhaps memory and cpu hogs, I can live without. On the other hand, they’ve included in the PRO version both oscilloscope and spectrum displays and they can be helpful. I installed the program without a problem and recorded just a few cuts to check it out. The recordings I made came out great. Record input level can be adjusted from within the program. That’s as it should be, but often it is not the case with audio recording software. I applaud Black Diamond for making life a little easier. Some menu choices are hidden until needed. Clicking on the “effects” button opens a menu to the right of the display. Clicking on the “Mixer” icon opens a display at the bottom of the screen. This is a good way of hiding menus not needed, but on the mixer setting I
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Associated Equipment and Recordings Main Computer AMD Athlon Socket A, 700 MHz (over clocked to 800 MHz), 512 MB PC133; Western Digital 40Gig, IDE HD at 7,200 rpm with 2-MB cache; Sony CRX-140E; Sound: Voyetra Turtle Beach, Santa Cruz; Video: Matrox Millennium G450; OS: Windows 98, Version 2.
those new CDs, but for now its one of those little tools that really helps along the way. EZAudio by Sony v. 1.04, $49.95. www.mediabysony.com Sony sells this as a kit, including the software, cables which will work with soundcards and audio-out phono plugs, and an adapter for headphone outputs. That’s
Laptop Compaq Presario, 380 MHz AMD K-6-III CPU, 128-MB RAM, ESS audio board, Windows 98SE. Audio Equipment Clean! Phono Preamp, Technics SLP 1600 turntable; Stanton 681 EEE and Empire 490 phone cartridges, BeyerDynamics DT131 and Grado SR 80 headphones. LP Albums Odyssey, various artists (A&M SP 19009, 1973) Living by the Days Don Nix (Elektra EKS-74101, 1971) Private Cassette Recording Piano, Karlheinz Moeller-Rehm J.S. Bach: Prelude and Fugue in e flat minor (BWV 853) Link Information To make life easier, I’ve listed all links to the software reviewed at http://bostonaudio.home.att.net/ ran out of screen, obscuring part of the total panel! (Using 1024 x 768 resolution on a 17-inch screen). The controls were visible only after very carefully moving the panel by dragging my mouse. There are a few sound effects you can add (including echo, 3D sound, reverb), but as always, be careful not to overdo it. Music Master Pro was a pleasure to use. I was glad I checked out the new Music Master PRO, and I recommend you do the same. Audio Grabber v. 1.81, $20.00. http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/ Ok, to be honest, this isn’t strictly an audio processing program. It is, however, one of the best if not the best audio-ripping program, meaning it can convert audio CD files into Wav files for processing. It can also “normalize” sound files, so that if you mix files, they will be roughly the same level. What’s best about it is that it can access an Internet database that immediately yields the name of the album, artist and track name, making it easy to label your new CD. (You can also import the database to your hard drive, though it will take up some space). Given the new trend towards copy-protection, I can’t promise that Grabber will continue to work as well on 00
actually quite helpful since those cables aren’t readily available in a lot of stores. It truly is a comprehensive kit and will get you started, so that you should be able to burn your first CD within a couple of hours. There is a “get started” overview which comes as a CD booklet. It’s not much, but probably enough to get you going and more than you’ll get from most other software companies. An Adobe Acrobat *.pdf file manual is included on the CD, and there are good help files within the program. There are also “wizards” which will guide you along. Personally, I’m not big on wizards, but I tried these out and can see that they would be helpful to someone new at recording. Still, the software is easy to use; most will soon opt for the manual controls. EZ Audio records, processes, converts to different formats, and burns CDs. It installed without a hitch, and I found the controls intuitively easy to use. Given that it’s targeted at beginners, I was surprised at the extent of processing available. Clicks, pops and tape hiss can all be treated, and there are a few enhancement controls as well, including a very nice equalizer. At their default settings, the processing controls did no harm, an important factor since many programs actually do add sound anomalies at their default process settings. For this kind of price you don’t, however, get perfection. EZ Audio did a good job of “cleaning up” hiss, crackles and pops, but some, more difficult ones, remained. The program could benefit from a few more preference settings (I didn’t like having to specify each time where I want the files to be). The level control button brought up the windows control instead of my soundcard specific Santa Cruz control (which has great meters and showed the Sony meters to read a bit high; in other words, on the “safe” side). But those minor complaints aside, the Sony produced some very good sound.
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SuperMP3Recorder v. 2.1, $19.95. www.supermp3recorder.com/ In a lot of respects, this is a very cute little recorder. It requires hardly any resources and has a simple, easy to use layout. This is strictly a recorder, no playback. Files can be created in either WAV or MP3 format. The only “processing” available is a noise filter that appears to be little more than a gentle high-frequency roll-off. It took me a bit of time to realize that there ARE meters on the thing. They are tiny and would be of little use even if they were accurate. Unfortunately, they read low and you’ll be clipping long before these meters will tell you (assuming you can find the meters!). Despite its limitations, I like this little program. CPU utilization was often around one percent, meaning this program will run on any system and will let you multitask. There was never a crash or even complaint from SuperMP3Recorder. The control layout is well-chosen, and the recordings made came out fine. There is no real documentation, but the “Help” pages, while being on the “light” side, are probably adequate. In many respects, this program is a good way to get started in recording, and if your needs are light and your budget tight, you might well be satisfied with it. Wave Corrector v.2.3, $45.00. Ganymede Test & Measurement Inc. http://www.wavecor.co.uk/ I have to admit, the first time I ran this program, I was totally blown away by its ability to clean up a lot of
Perhaps one of the best features is that Wave Corrector allows you to listen to and compare the original track to the corrected track before you settle on the correction and save the file. Wave Corrector lets you save “session files” which store the list of corrections (including your edits) for later retrieval. Recording is straightforward with LED-type bar for level control. I would prefer the display to be a bit more precise and larger, but it’s adequate enough to get the job done. It is possible to set the length of the recording time, which allows for unattended recording. This is yet another program that used the default Windows recordlevel control. Installation of the program was without a hitch, and the program’s footprint on the drive is less than 2 MB. Wave Corrector is a basic program for recording and cleaning up wav files. It does not have special effects. In addition to the automatic cleanup, it allows you to insert cue points, clean up clicks, reduce noise from LPs and tapes, divide files into tracks and splice files together. The program has very good “Help” files that go into detail without becoming tedious. A 69-page manual is available in the Acrobat file format. Recommendations I sometimes have friends ask me for recommendations for getting into recording their tapes and LPs onto CDs, and I will now recommend the Sony EZ Audio Kit. It’s a great way to get started and will turn out fine transfers. I appreciate the program’s clear layout of controls, its stability on any computer system likely to get it installed, and its many features. At its retail price, it’s a very good value for the money. At its street price (I’ve seen it in retail stores for $40), it blows away the competition. If you do have a large LP collection with “issues” (clicks, pops, etc.), you will get better recordings by using a program such as Wave Corrector. If you read our previous review, you might wonder how this program compares to WaveRepair. These programs are similar in many ways. Wave Corrector is more automated, but WaveRepair is more precise. I found myself preferring to start with Wave Corrector, but going back to Wave Repair for removing those last few pesky clicks. Either program, though, will be able to clean up LPs that you’ve given up on playing the “standard” way.
clicks and pops automatically. With most programs like this, the automated mode is either too harsh, removing some of the music, or simply not quite as effective as I would like. Wave Corrector comes darn close to being perfect in finding a good mid-point. Yes, on really close listening, I could still find sections where things weren’t as good as I might have done manually (such as a few known difficult clicks on the Odyssey album), but for casual, on-the-fly cleanup, the program is great. (Of course, you can always adjust things to your liking using the manual controls). The program ALWAYS scans files being opened unless you click “Cancel.” I wished I could disable that, since I opened a lot of files! Once scanned, Wave Corrector displays a list of the clicks and their magnitude next to a picture of the wav file. Additional scans can yield more information on clicks. You CAN adjust the magnitude of the clicks listed, which is a good thing, since some of the files I recorded have hundreds of little clicks in just a few minutes. Volume 8, Issue 3
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