I see a second week of this theme on Afternoon on 3 is coming next week. Some of the recorded performances look very enticing, "Éclairs sur l'au-dela" (BBCSSO/Volkov) and Turangalîla (Sydney Symphony Orchestra/Simone Young) in particular. Looks like I will have to resurrect my DAT recorder (which has a timer facility) to save them from FM.

Thank you, spatny. However, I have now thought of a way of doing the jobs without recourse to the DAT recorder. I had forgotten that I cleared the hard drive on my Alesis Masterlink in order to record Dave Smith's 1st Piano Concert a fortnight ago. I have just checked and there is 34 hours of hard disc space (at CD rate) waiting to be used, so I will be able to set the thing recording before I leave for work, then edit out the Messiaen (and anything else I might want to keep) when I get home.

I have never had a drop-out problem yet with the Masterlink, but have with the (Tascam) DAT recorder I used to employ before I got the Alesis. I do wish the latter had a timer facility, but it doesn't.

I use the CD24 facility thus:

I record, say, Dave Smith's 1st Piano Concert as one 'track' at 96/24. I then use the built-in editing facilities on the Masterlink to chop it into groups of sonatas, each group with a total duration of less than the 21'18" limit of a 703MB CD-RW (CD24). I then burn each group of sonatas to a CD24 CD-RW, pop that into the external DVD/CD writer attached to this laptop and copy the AIFF file over to one of the laptop's hard discs for further editing before burning to DVD-R using Audio DVD Creator. That way I have a couple of hours of 96/24 recording on a single DVD playable in any fairly modern DVD player.

I have only ever burned CD24 CD-Rs (as against CD-RWs) when no erased CD-RW has been to hand. Since they can only be played in the Masterlink, or on a PC/MAC, they are of rather limited use, other than for transferring recordings from the Masterlink to a PC for editing.

The Masterlink firmware does have lots of editing facilities, but compared to a DAW on a PC or MAC, they are pretty cumbersome.

I got the Masterlink about 3 years ago, when it had a massive price drop to around £430 at Digital Village. Looks like it has climbed up a bit again since then, despite not being able to write direct to DVD recordable, and only being able to address a 40GB maximum internal HD. One thing to bear in mind is that as basically pro equipment, there are no input level controls, (other than the choice of XLR or RCA, offering +4dBu and -10dBV nominal input level respectively). Input signal level has to be sorted before the signal gets to the Masterlink, in a mixer for instance. The -10dBV RCA input suits the output from my FM tuner,and the line out from my amplifier when transferring from LP, fairly well. Though I do find I often need to boost the level a few dB when editing the results on the PC.

Bryn,

I tried recording at 96/24 bit using my Apogee duet and Audacity. I then exported the file to AIFF. It sounds wonderful within my iTunes/Apple TV combination. However within iTunes the bit rate was 3072 kbps ... is that correct? The duet specs indicate it is a 24-bit/96kHz audio device.

http://www.apogeedigital.com/products/duet.php?section=specs

Should I be using another export setting?

I then made a DVD, and I am wondering if its better than my original FM reception !!!

BWS

Peter

Hi,

Many thanks again. I did make a mistake in pre recording selection. I recorded 96/24, 96/16 and 48/16 and all recordings seem far better than the 44.1/16 setting. I will do some more experiments tonight with the Verdi Requiem

I did record the Turangalila-symphonie .... if your recording failed.

Many thanks again

Peter