Re: audio cards or radio cards

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] says...
> Is there a good audio or radio/audio card?
> I want to record radio to Mp3

CQ Magazine's October issue started a series of articles on digital 
sound recording.  Part III came out in December's issue.  Not sure how 
many future parts there are, but it's worth reading.

As Mike mentioned, use your sound card for the audio input.  You can use 
the Sound Recorder application that comes as a part of Windows to do 
your recording, or you can find some other programs that give you a 
little more versatility.  I've been playing with GoldWave, which does a 
fair job.  CoolEdit2000 is another good one, although I think they've 
been bought by Adobe.

The procedure I use is:

1) Feed the audio from the receiver into the Line In port on the
   computer's sound card;
2) Hook the speakers up to the output of the sound card;
3) Start GoldWave, and make sure it is configured to accept input
   from the Line-In connection (by default it isn't);
4) Start a new file in GoldWave, specifying the length of the file
   in minutes and seconds;
5) Click the Record button.

When it's done, I save it to disk as a .WAV file (which is what GoldWave 
defaults to), then I use the XP Plus! pack utility to convert the file 
from .WAV to .WMA format.  The .WMA format provides a LOT of 
compression, moreso even than MP3.  A 25Mb .WAV file recording of a 
shortwave broadcast last night compressed down to about 700K in .WMA 
format!  (An MP3 file would be about double that size, but still far 
smaller than the .WAV file originally was.)

-- 

-- //Steve//

Steve Silverwood, KB6OJS
Fountain Valley, CA
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web: http://home.earthlink.net/~kb6ojs_steve