source requires a cable with left and right male RCA plugs on one end and a single stereo
male 1/8-inch phone plug on the other. A synthesizer or an electronic keyboard typically
uses 1/4-inch phone jacks, so the adapter cable to use is one with left and right male 1/4-inch
phone plugs on one end and a single stereo male 1/8-inch phone plug on the other.
For capturing live sound, there are a number of inexpensive PC microphones available.
PC microphones are designed with 1/8-inch phone plugs to connect directly to the mic in-
put of most sound cards. A higher-end microphone will typically have either a 1/4-inch
phone plug or an XLR (eXternal/Live/Return) connector, which require a jack adapter or
an adapter cable to connect into the sound card’s 1/8-inch jack.
If the source is a device with digital I/O, such as a MiniDisc or DAT device, and the
sound card is a digital device, the cabling you should use depends on the type of ports avail-
able. Directly connecting these devices requires cables that are specifically designed for digi-
tal data. S/P-DIF (Sony/Philips—Digital Interface Format) cables, for example, look almost
identicaltothestandardRCAaudiocablesbutareactuallyquitedifferent.Thesameistrueof
AES/EBU (Audio Engineering Society/European Broadcasting Union) cables, which look
like standard XLR microphone cables but are in fact very different underneath the wrapper.
It is not likely that you will run into these cables working with your PC unless you plan to do
professional-level sound recording, engineering, and editing on your PC.
With the appropriate connections made using the proper cabling and jacks, the rest of
the sound capture operation is controlled by software. There is a wide variation in the ca-
pabilitiesandcontrolsinaudiocapturesoftware.However,onalllevelsofsophistication,
it all boils down to when you wish to record a sound, you click the Record button and
start the noise. When you have captured as much of the noise as you desire, you click the
Stop button. It is before and after these steps that the complexity of this task exists.
HerearesomeoftheconsiderationsyoushouldaddresswhencapturingaudioonaPC: File type Before you capture your sounds, you should have some idea of which
of the available audio file formats you wish to use. There is a variety of audio
file types to choose from; the most common audio capture format for Windows
systems is the WAV file. The different audio file formats use different methods
of encoding and compressing the sound data. The WAV format provides the
most flexibility for later converting the sound file to another file format. Many
audio capture applications will only capture to WAV files.
File size Audio files are large, especially if the sound is captured at a CD-
quality sample rate and resolution (sample rates will be discussed shortly).
For example, just ten seconds of stereo sound recorded at 44.1 kHz (kilohertz)
and 16 bits (what is referred to as “CD-quality”) requires about 2MB of disk
space. If disk space is an issue, then you can decide which is more important,
the quality of the sound recording or whether the sound needs to be in stereo
or mono. The latter can cut the size of the file by half.
Input level Recording sound at a very quiet level will produce a very noisy
playback at normal volume levels. On the other hand, recording sound too loud
can result in clipping.Clippingmeans that the digital waveform peaks of the sound(^546) PC Hardware: A Beginner’s Guide