Recording on the PC

Here's the deal; 99% of the time I sample from vinyl. Now, however, I need to sample something from CD. So I encoded the beginning of a song to. wav (versus playing it and recording it), figuring I wouldn't lose any "loudness" this way. The thing is that the samples are still quiet as hell. I do realize that by normalizing I get the levels straight, BUT I'm fairly certain that if I were sampling the same thing from vinyl, I'd get the loud sound minus the normalization hiss. Any ideas? Moreover, what's the best way to get wav's from CDs without losing any quality?

please...

get a good sound card?

I usually sample it from the PC audio outs, but I guess that's cuz I have a 60 that doesn't read wav's.


if it is for 1% of the time, Id go with this.

have you tried not normalizing but just boosting the level in an audio editor?

word, thanks for the reply. I'll probably try recording pc -> mpc.

"have you tried not normalizing but just boosting the level in an audio editor?"

I'll try that, too.

What audio editor do you use? You should have no problem normalizing a section of the wav. to a decent level.

Soundforge. Sure, normalizing makes the sample loud, but since the sound is so quiet originally, normalizing adds a great deal of hiss..

Try raising the volume gradually, this works for me in soundforge. if particularly noisy, make good use of the graphic eq to kill some of the highs.

Every bit of noise in the sample will always be normalized as well, so you should try to filter the noise out somehow before or after normalizing.
There should be something like a noise gate function in Soundforge, if not, get yourself a directX plug-in that takes care of noise.