November 12, 2005

• guess i gotta pay for metafilter ...cant afford... *tears*
• You poor thing. Be patient. Some monkey will come along with your answer soon. Things seem to quiet down around here on weekends. Don't give up hope. I promise you this: if someone does not provide you with a helpful answer on here within 24 hours, then I will personally make up an solution to your problem that sounds mildly plausible.
• Yeah, well I'm a sound engineer, but unfortunately I've never tried this. Without more details of the equipment, it's kind of hard to make an assessment but obviously we have a level mismatch problem. You need a device that will correct the input/output level problem between your phone and the computer; if I were doing this I would use a small mixer and a limiter, but there are other doodads on the market that will do this job. If no one comes up with anything I'll use my google fu and suggest a suitable thing. What I will say is that you want to be really careful about amplifying things too much going into your audio input, this can fux0r things pretty good if you go too far. Distortion is usually a sign of over amplification, and this is bad. If the signal is too low, or crackly, then that's a different problem to do with impedance or the crappy cable, or whatnot. Same goes with amplifying into your phone, you need to get the level just right or it will be too low, and faint, or too high and majorly clipping (distorted, like thru a fuzz pedal). The former is fixable, the latter is bery bery bad for your phone! hehe I would also consider what kind of sound card you have in your box and which input you are using to get the signal into the card, there are usually a mic input and a line input. Now see there are two basic levels used for audio signals, mic and line. Line level is the basic signal strength used by audio processing equipment, mic level is weaker. There is no point in going into the complexities of this, this exists for various technical reasons. You should keep line level signals away from mic level inputs or it go bang. What level is your phone at? No clue. Look at where it's plugged into the puter, if it is a mic level signal into the mic input, you need some kind of mini amp or something to give the extra grunt, but you should not amplify the output from the puter to the phone, if this is the case, because you'll only have one audio output at line level. You'll have to step it down. There are various amp/limiters that could be used for this, so many that in fact I wouldn't even begin to suggest one, talk to a professional at an audio store, I mean a real audio store not radio shack or something. Check (and be cautious) which input port on the computer the phone output is connected to, if it is in the mic input maybe try putting it into the line input, but make sure that your volume sliders on your soundcard gui are all set *lowest* as you experiment and only increase them incrementally. This could get you somewhere to begin with, but I've never tried what you're doing and I think you'll need a specific extra device to step up/step down those signals to and from your phone & computer. Sorry for length of comment, and my brain is fuzzy today.
• Well, I killed the thread but good.
• Hey, POKEOUTMYEYE- want me to post your question on AskMe?
• >Well, I killed the thread but good. That'll teach it. I'm not a sound engineer, nor do I play one on TV. I have had some success with recording audio at home, though, through a preamp. Plug microphone (or, presumably, other sound source) into preamp input; plug preamp output into line input on sound card; make noise in front of microphone. That's about the extent of my experience, and I think it amounts to (a much dumber version of) the same thing Chyren said. I coughed up close to a hundred bucks for a tube preamp; cheaper signal-boosting options are presumably available. Be advised that I don't really know what I'm doing, and dumb luck is probably at least part of the reason I didn't end up with smoke coming out of my PC.
• Tube preamps give me the horn.
• It's hard for me to really give a decent answer since I'm not sure what kind of setup you actually have to do this. From your initial post you make it sound like you have a home-made rig of sorts, so I probably won't be much help, but I will tell you my experience with this. I have hooked two different phones to my computer (a Motorola and a Samsung). I did this so that I could put whatever damn ring tone I wanted instead of being limited to the most popular radio option at the time. In order to do this, I had to buy a single cable for each phone that had a USB connector on it. If you buy such a cable in a store, it runs you about $40 because it also has to come with lame software to help you navigate your phone's files. I made a feeble attempt to avoid using the software, but my computer wouldn't recognize the phone any other way and I gave up after 5 minutes of cussing. Anyway, the Motorola gave me no trouble. I made a low quality mp3 (for file size purposes) and dropped it into the "Sounds" folder on my phone and it sounded just fine. The Samsung however doesn't play mp3s. It plays MMF files, and every time I converted mp3 to MMF it sounded distorted, yet very quiet. I'm not sure if there is software out there that is better at such a conversion, but I got some rubbish program that disappointed me and I lost interest in putting my favorite Buckethead track on the phone because it didn't do it justice, nor did it work well as a ringtone because it was so quiet. I tried several things, but from what I could tell, it was a problem with the conversion to MMF. With that said, what types of files does your phone use and is it possible that the phone is doing it's own conversion? Throw some more details my way. I still probably won't be able to tell you how to fix it, but that's the joy of modern technology. You have to be a guru to make things cooperate.
• >Tube preamps give me the horn. It seems to give good results, though I don't have anything to compare them to but the results obtained by my previous method- which was to plug a guitar cable into the mic input, record a (very tiny) sound, and then try to use wave-editing software to get the volume up to an acceptable level...
• "plug a guitar cable into the mic input, record a (very tiny) sound, and then try to use wave-editing software" Oh fuck, don't do that. Not because it will kill anything, just because it sounds shit. DI box. Buy one! I have this pre-amp DI box which is not in front of me right now so I can't tell you what it is, but it emulates the load of an amp, so it doesn't have that tinny shitty sound when you plug your guit in. It's not great, but it does sound much better than direct i/p. But you have to have the aux output of the DI box going into an amp or other load for it to work, or it goes bang.
• Help?
• >just because it sounds shit. Yeah, I noticed that about it... Of course, having upgraded my setup a bit, I'm still trying to record acoustic instruments in an attic studio with the acoustic properties of a soggy box- a SMALL, soggy box- with a not-acoustically-isolated PC humming and whirring about two feet from anyplace I can put the mic. And trucks driving down the street, and so on. Still- it's amazing what it's possible to do with that and a $60 consumer version of Soundforge, and Acid conscripted to do general multitracking instead of just loops. Twenty years ago I was dicking around with a half-busted 4-track cassette machine. There is something to be said for having lived to see the Dawn Of Personal Computing. So what's a good MIDI editor? A few years back it was Cakewalk, or so I thought; but now Cakewalk seems to have been split up into seven or eight undistinguished-looking products, and I downloaded a demo from the Twelve-Tone site that wouldn't even install, so I'm thinking maybe they've fallen on hard times...
• Here's a tip - record your guit in the toilet (or bathroom). Tiled 'white rooms' or just painted walls give a nice reverb, plus you can close the door. I actually often record my guit amp in the toilet (I'm playing outside of course, the amp and mics are in the bog) MIDI editor? Dunno really, I just use Cubase. I have no idea what the cutting edge stuff is. I'd love ProTools but too expensive.