Best software for a CD

[Jackalyn]

Some years ago I made a professional CD. It cost a fair bit to do at the time and to be honest, I gave away more than I sold as it is spoken word and not everyone's cup of tea. However, things have moved on and these days you can extract all the tracks and upload them to well loads of places and it may be worth doing that.

So I have some technical questions. Is Rhythym box going to affect the quality or what is uploaded? Iss the quality actually in the files itself?. Is there any good software that will convert the file types if I need that and if anyone has done this, using linux, do they have any advice?

I think this will be a once off as these days there is good enough recording software for what I want to do, and friends have the ability to make things sound ok-but anyway would be nice to get the project out there one more time....So another question is, what do people rate for recording purposes. I do sometimes record for an internet radio show for a friend of mine and we have literally been using skype phone and his skill once the recording is done! I think now though we are both too busy and I need to record and send. I have Audacity, so is there any advance on that?

[sandyd]

Some years ago I made a professional CD. It cost a fair bit to do at the time and to be honest, I gave away more than I sold as it is spoken word and not everyone's cup of tea. However, things have moved on and these days you can extract all the tracks and upload them to well loads of places and it may be worth doing that.

So I have some technical questions. Is Rhythym box going to affect the quality or what is uploaded? Iss the quality actually in the files itself?. Is there any good software that will convert the file types if I need that and if anyone has done this, using linux, do they have any advice?

I think this will be a once off as these days there is good enough recording software for what I want to do, and friends have the ability to make things sound ok-but anyway would be nice to get the project out there one more time....So another question is, what do people rate for recording purposes. I do sometimes record for an internet radio show for a friend of mine and we have literally been using skype phone and his skill once the recording is done! I think now though we are both too busy and I need to record and send. I have Audacity, so is there any advance on that?

Firstly, any conversion is lossy. There is no way to avoid that unless you upload all the WAV files (assuming you are ripping from cd). If you are recording, I reccomend you to upload to somewhere like soundcloud. You can record using Audacity and upload to sound cloud. To date, I believe that the WAV format offers the highest quality, but most of it is undetectable by the human ear and takes up quite a lot of space, so it has fallen slightly into disuse.

[Jackalyn]

Firstly, any conversion is lossy. There is no way to avoid that unless you upload all the WAV files (assuming you are ripping from cd). If you are recording, I reccomend you to upload to somewhere like soundcloud. You can record using Audacity and upload to sound cloud. To date, I believe that the WAV format offers the highest quality, but most of it is undetectable by the human ear, so it has fallen slightly into disuse.

Thanks, that makes sense.

[cek]

WAV files are uncompressed and lossless and are used everywhere -- almost all professional recording software records natively to WAV files. That said, due to the size of the files, WAV files are generally not distributed.

Most formats you are likely familiar with involve some loss such as MP3, MP4, etc. However, there are also several lossless audio codects, such as FLAC.

[mcduck]

Actually there are lossless compression formats available, for excample FLAC would provide exactly the same quality as the original CD has, but with a considerably smaller sizes (50-70% of the original file). And it even has a reasonably wide support on different programs and devices.

I'd recommend providing FLAC files for the quality, and then additional compressed MP3 files for smaller doownloads and best compatibility.