Help with recording, Im stupid

What is the easiest 4 or 8 track recorder to use? I have tried some that are too difficult to use. I would like to get away with less than $400. I am just a garage musician. Thanks

Try the Fostex MR8. It's not fancy and it's not high quality, but it'll get the job done (and more) for your purposes. Plus, it's 300 bucks and comes with a built in microphone + some cheesy effects. Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention it's digital and has 8 tracks...a fine toy for any garage musician.

if you're burning an audio CD why convert from wav to mp3?

confused... :-/

So I can fit more than 4 songs on a Cd.

ah, so it's *not* an audio CD you're burning? or you're burning a CD for players that play mp3s?

It is an audio cd I tried to burn. I don't want to burn wave files to cd as they would be HUUUGEEE!!!! When I convert the wave to mp3 then burn it to a cd as cd audio it warbles.

In alt.guitar, Guncho uttered the immortal words:

If I understand you correctly you've got it all wrong. If you're burning an audio CD, like the CDs you buy in a shop to play on normal CD players, it doesn't make a blind bit of difference whether the files you're burning are wav, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Flac or anything else, a 4 minute song will take up exactly the same amount of space on an audio CD format disc. In all cases the files are decompressed first (except for wav files of course) and the actual audio is burned to the CD, not the file.

To test this I ripped Iron Maiden's Dance of Death album to MP3 and wav formats. The MP3s took 63MB of disk space while the wavs took 688MB of disk space. I started K3b, my CD/DVD burning app, and created two audio CD projects. Into one I dumped the MP3s and into the other I dumped the wavs. K3b reported that it needed 601.5MB of space on the CD in both cases.

For best quality you're better off using wavs or a loseless format like Flac. MP3 and other lossy formats throw away some data. If you were to convert an MP3 (or other lossy format file) to Vorbis (or another lossy format) you've already lost some data saving it to MP3. You'll lose some more converting it to Vorbis. Whether you can actually hear a difference is another matter though.

As to why you're getting a warbling or tremolo effect, I have no idea. I've not come across that before.

thanks Andy... saved me some typing :0)

weird... well if you have luck trying Andy's recommendations (and I think you will) it might be a problem any more

but.... if you still want to do it from MP3s (bearing in mind the lower quality as Andy mentioned) - has it happened more than once? I'm thinking jitter while burning....

have a go with WAVs - remembering that audio data is just that - ignore file sizes cos the standard CDA doesn't look at them the same way your OS does

good luck

****Warning I am not very computer savvy******

Unfortunately the computer the original wave files were on died and the hard drive was wiped so all I have is the final mix of the mp3s.

Maybe I'll try burning them again??

Nope, you're screwed. The wavery sound is an artifact of converting the files to MP3s and the lossy compression that's used. As soon as you make an MP3 some of the sound info is lost, never to be recovered.The original .wav files (uncompressed audio) were the ones you'd want to burn to CD.

MP3s are great for getting an idea of what music sounds like in a low-fi situation (eg. portable music player etc) but don't ever make the mistake of saying that they sound just like the original recording.