A tip for anyone wanting to record on to their PC...

Before you record anything at all, do a silent recording first.

Wot?!

Don't plug anything in at all, and record the sound of the sound card on its own. You may be unpleasantly surprised by the amount of digital noise.

If such noise exists, it is virtually impossible to correct, either before or after recording. As the noise is probably inherent in the PC, it can be like finding a needle in a haystack!

Possible solutions...

Try a different sound card.

Try moving the sound card to a different PCI slot - away from the video card. Okay, if it's an onboard card and onboard video, you're stuffed! One of my PCs has that problem.

So... try a different PC!!

There are lots USB devices around now that you can use instead, some really cheap, others not.

Some software (Cool Edit/Adobe Audition, for example - Adobe bought Cool Edit from Syntrillium) will allow you to use the 'silent' sample as a template for noise reduction, but there is usually some degredation of the signal you want to keep as well.

The setup I use for our Radio Britfolk programmes has an M-Audio Delta 1010 in a fairly elderly PC. This has a very simple sound card, with outboard inputs and outputs housed in a 19" rackmount. There are 8 line inputs and 8 line outputs, and it is beautifully clean. The card also has co-ax in and out SPDIF sockets, which I can use with my Tascam 788 HDD recorder.

The PC doesn't need to be all that quick by modern standards, mine is an AMD Athon 1.15 with 512 memory, running XP SP2. It has a 300Gb primary drive, a 200Gb secondary, and two LiteON CD burners.

The software I use is SoundForge, which is quick and easy when you get used to it...!! I much prefer it to Cool Edit and Audition, which I also have. I was allowed a cheap upgrade to Audition, as I had a registered version of CoolEdit 2000... interestingly it allows me to have both concurrently on the same PC.

When Ali and I used to do 'Sounds of Folk' on BBC GMR, I had access to Quick Edit Pro, which is part of the RadioMan suite. It was good, but rather clunky to use - and it didn't properly follow the Windows conventions with filenames, etc., which made it rather hit-and-miss. The worst part was it created a new file each time you did a 'save to database', and very few users had delete permissions... Understandable on a live radio station, I suppose, but a pain nonetheless!

I could bore for England writing about this lot... if there's anything of interest, then fine - if you'd like to know more, ask.