Making MP3 Files with Cool Edit 2000

By Reid Wilson, editor of Language Learning

First appeared: Language Learning #23

Here's a question I received this week, along with my response.

Q: "I have loaded the Cool Edit 2000 and MusicMatch Jukebox software and am trying to use it. In recording from cassettes onto the Cool Edit 2000 program, which port do you use on the side of your laptop? I have tried the microphone jack as well as the music note jack and neither one results in a good recording. Though the recording on the cassette was made with a good lapel mic we just bought, when transferred to the Cool Edit 2000, there is a lot of noise. Perhaps I am doing something wrong or I may need to make some adjustments. Please advise on what is needed. On the cassette recorder I am plugging the audio cord into the ear part and hitting play. Obviously I am hitting record on the computer."

A: Hi. We use the microphone jack on our notebook computer. I bet your problem is that the recording sound level is set too high. We've found two things give us the best recordings. Both processes are quite simple but they may sound a little complicated as I type them out. Just follow them step-by-step and it should be easy to implement:

First of all, set the microphone level on the computer. (Lower it.) From within Cool Edit 2000, click on OPTIONS and then WINDOWS MIXER from the menu. A window called "Volume Control" should show up. (If your sound card is different from ours it may say something different, but the general principle will work regardless of your particular soundcard.) Click on OPTIONS and then PROPERTIES from the menu, and then select "adjust volume for RECORDING". Make sure the microphone box is checked, and then click OK. A new box should show up, showing the Volume setting for the microphone. It likely is set at 50% unless you've changed it in the past. Move it down to about 20-25% (just eyeball it) and then EXIT. (Our version doesn't have an OK button, but exiting saves the setting.) (By the way, whenever we use Net2Phone we change this setting to 100%, which helps the people we're talking to hear us better.)

Secondly, whenever you are recording something in Cool Edit 2000 from your cassette player onto the computer, closely watch the recording volume level monitor--the horizontal red line at the bottom of the screen. At the far right of the monitor is a vertical line at 0. Ideally your sound input should get as close to zero as possible without going past it, and you especially never want it to stay beyond that point. (If you do, your recording will "peg" and will sound distorted. The way that you adjust this when you are beginning to record is to hit "play" on the tape player and then adjust the volume on the tape player (not your computer) until the red line is not pegging during your playback. When we do this, we end up turning the volume down on the tape player quite a bit--we can barely hear the sound through our computer speakers or headphones as it is recording. Setting the volume low like this, adjusting it to the red recording volume level monitor, gives us great recording quality.

Anyway, once you get the recording volume set right (you'll need to do this every time, but it will take just a couple seconds once you get the hang of it), stop the recording, rewind the tape, and do it again from the beginning. At this point you should be making excellent recordings.

You didn't ask about this, but I'll mention other settings on Cool Edit 2000. When we start a new file, we tell it to use a sample rate of 48,000 with 16-bit stereo. Then, after we've recorded and edited the new file and are ready to save, we save them as file type MPEG 3 (mp3) with the options set to a bitrate  of 32kbps, S/R of 16,000, MS Stereo, HQ of yes, and at the bottom of the box we choose "higher quality (9)" instead of "faster". It takes longer for the original save but then you get better quality every time you listen to the file. You can theoretically get better recordings by saving them at 48kbps instead of 32, but we can't really tell a difference, and the 48kbps files are larger. If I had a higher quality cassette recorder I'd probably save them at a higher rate. (A chain is as weak as its weakest link, and for us it's our original cassette recordings. Just for reference, CD quality is 128kbps, with "near CD quality" being 96kbps.) These settings give us good results. It's possible that a better combination would improve things a bit, but after experimenting quite a bit this is what we recommend.

Hope this helps,

Reid