damage your soundcard!!
Turntable to Mike in.
Many thanks to Mark Tranchant for the following.
The raw output from a record deck cartridge is very low level. However, you cannot plug it directly into a
microphone input and expect good results. The output requires equalization, as records are mastered with
less bass and more treble to optimize the physics of the moving needle. This equalization is carefully defined
and referred to as RIAA equalization. You *need* to run the output through a phono preamp first, and then
into a line input.
Music keyboards & synths should be connected to the Soundcards Line in, with guitars connecting to Line in
via a DI (Direct Injection, used to convert the signal to Line level) box.
Before you plug in anything into your soundcard, make sure the volume levels are turned down to minimum,
or if using microphones they are either turned off or away from speakers.
8.2 Setting up for CD−ROM Audio Capture
Setting up your Linux system to extract audio data from CD−ROM is reasonably straight forward.
If you can hear a track playing from your CD−ROM through your speakers or amplifier, connected to your
soundcard, then there's a reasonable chance you should be able to record from it.
8.3 Additional Setting up
Log in as per normal to your system, then using a mixer program set the recording levels that are loud enough
to give you a decent recording level, but aren't too loud and distorting. I normally just judge this by ear, after
a while you'll get to know what levels are best for your kit.
I recommend either turning off all unnecessary services or switching to the single user runlevel, especially
when encoding from an audio source. This is to ensure that the bare minimum of services are running and
thus minimising system glitches when recording.
I've set up a separate SCSI drive, exclusively to record the audio to, which I'll refer to as /mp3. I've done this
mainly for the performance gains in using a SCSI drive. Also, recording onto a dedicated drive, where you
are almost certain the head isn't going to suddenly skip to another part of the drive as you are writing audio
data to it, is a good thing :)
For details on setting up a Linux system with multiple disk drives, a good read of the Multi−Disk−HOWTO,
by Stein Gjoen may be useful.
9. Encoding from Audio.
Firstly, make sure you have enough space on your drive. At CD quality, 44.1 Khz 16 Bit stereo, 1 minute
takes nearly 10 Mb (5 MB per channel).
The Linux MP3−HOWTO
8.2 Setting up for CD−ROM Audio Capture 13
