Audio Recording

This blog receives a lot of inquiries. I am interested to share my insights on them to you.

Burning a Audio Mixing Session to a CD

I’m taking a class and I’ve received a session to mix. Every time I burn the wav files using windows media player turns it to regular audio. The problem with that; it loads as audio so it’s a stereo file, can’t get around that. A single kick would load on track 1 and 2. Explain to me when I burn wav files to disc it stays as a wav file. I’m using windows vista.

Potential Issues

a.) Your CD burning software (Windows media player) creates an audio CD. This would automatically mean that even if the audio is mono (as what most tracks for mixing are) it would automatically be converted to stereo.

b.) If you burn the recorded tracks to audio CD, it would lose its original recording resolution since audio CD always has a 16-bit/44.1KHz. Most recording are done at a higher resolution such as 24-bit/48KHz.

Potential Solution

a.) Some CD burning software (like Nero) does include a data disc feature. In this case, you can burn the recorded tracks in its original form and they are not converted to audio CD format (16-bit/44.1KHz).

b.) If you want an open source solution, you can use Infra-recorder:

http://infrarecorder.org/
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Music and songs are legally available in two major forms:

a. Copyrighted
b. Public domain

Naturally, if you use music or songs that belong to the public domain then you will not need to get permission. However things are very different if the music is copyrighted. This is where a lot of confusion can take place. This is a complete tutorial for a beginner in knowing how to get permission to use copyrighted music.

Step1.) Find the music publisher of the copyrighted music

You need to know the music publisher of the song. Music publisher administers copyrighted work that includes the songs/music. This is where you need to obtain permission to use music. In most cases, this is not available so you need to do some research. You can start with the artist or the songwriter of the song. You will know the artist or songwriter by examining the ID3 tags information of the MP3 file (or CD in-lay for CD album).

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Downloading songs from the Internet is always a “hot issue” particularly with respect to the copyright owners.

So how can you find ways to legally download free music in the Internet without registration?

Tip#1: Indie artist would offer some of their songs for free

It is indeed hard to find quality music for free on the Internet. The public domain music is fine but it was highly outdated or sound obsolete, those classical music will not appreciate the entire modern listeners.

Most websites like Amazon, iTunes, CD Baby needs users to be registered and a lot of information is needed before someone can download music. Most of them are not for free.

But thanks to the indie music industry; they are happy to share their music and would always be looking for new fans. The secret is to find them. One of reliable and easy to use website is SoundCloud:

a.) Search tracks here:
http://soundcloud.com/tracks/search

For example, leave the form blank and click “Show advance search options”. You can then select what genre you like (e.g. rock) as well as the license. You can also set if you are looking for original work instead of a cover or a demo.

Then click the following (it will turn to orange):

-free to use commercially
-free to modify
-no rights reserved
-downloadable

This is how it looks like:

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