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How To Record MP3's For Different Songs

Want to record Top 40 and other playlists as separate songs, automatically?

Here's How:

If you want to use your PC as a loss-less digital sound recorder that will automatically separate songs in a playlist while recording, like TopHots1.wav, TopHits2.wav, TopHits3.wav, etc., then this tutorial is for you.

• If you can hear the list of songs you want to record, you can record them as separate songs.  While it is your responsibility not to violate any copyrights, in this tutorial you will listen to the Top Hits playlist from WIXX below.  You can record an entire playlist as separate songs from the Internet, or from any input source, using the Concrete Recorder, one of several great utilities available in Concrete Tools.

While there are many digital recording software programs, we don't know of any that can do this except for the Concrete Recorder.  Concrete Recorder senses the silence between songs and automatically creates separate sound files for each song on your hard drive in the loss-less WAV format.

Remember recording the radio on a cassette to tape the best songs?  This is the same concept only now the songs are playing from an Internet radio station or web site, and the cassette tape is your PC running recording software.  And it is much, much easier. 

Step 1

Start Recorder now and make sure "Create new when quieter than" is checked.

• If you are running Concrete DJ, push the Record button to launch the Concrete Recorder from the dashboard.  If not, launch the recorder from the Concrete Tools dashboard.

IMPORTANT:  Be sure that Create new when quieter than" is checked.  This will automatically create new sound files, one for each song.

• If nothing is happening, make sure you have the right input device selected.  In this case, Stereo Mix is the input device to use when playing the song on the same PC you are recording from.  It may be called something different with your sound card.

• If nothing is playing, or if silence is being detected, the oscilloscope will show a flat line and the caption reads "Skipping silence".  The default values for threshold and length will work OK in most cases.  In the example above, "silence" is whenever volume levels fall below the 1800 threshold.  When a silent passage longer than 500 ms (half a second) is detected, Concrete Recorder will automatically start recording a new sound file.  While the defaults work for most, feel free to experiment by changing the threshold and length for your special needs.

Step 2

Start playing a list of music.

• For example, if you are a lala subscriber, you could start playing all the songs on a playlist like the WIXX Hit List.

WIXX Hit List

Step 3

Adjust the input level using the top slider so that the waveform for the loudest notes is not being cut-off.

 

That's It!

Once the sound files are created, you can play them "as is" in .WAV format, use them to burn a CD, or resample them using the Concrete Editor or other sound file editing utility and export them as properly named and tagged MP3 files.

 

Notes

• To make loss-less recordings with the highest possible audio quality, Concrete Recorder uses the .WAV format.  WAV files are uncompressed and have more digital information contained within than smaller MP3, WMA and other compressed formats.  WAV files take approximately 10 MB of hard drive space per every minute of audio so an average 3 minute long song is about 30 MB.  From WAV format you can use other tools, like the Concrete Editor, to resample the sound file, add tags like Title and Artist, and resave it as an MP3, WMA, etc.  You can always export these compressed formats from the master .WAV file.  Concrete Editor is also included in Concrete Tools.

 

Troubleshooting

• If new songs aren't being created, increase the Threshold value for silence.
• If too many sound files are being created, increase the Length value for silent passages.

 

FAQs

Why would I want to make recordings with a set of smaller files instead of one large one?

The most important reason is that if the sound file is too large, you will not have enough memory to load it.  You won't be able to play it or edit it.  A sound file larger than 15 minutes or so becomes very unwieldy and hard to work with on a PC.  Another reason is that with separate sound files there are no pauses in-between, and songs can be cross-faded with DJ software like Concrete DJ.