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As well as dedicated digital recorders, there’s another way to record high quality digital sound, using computing power you may have on your desk already.

You can use a notebook computer to do the complex conversion of soundwaves into digits. It’s possible to record direct to the computer, but laptop sound cards are not usually designed for high quality audio, so for good and reliable results you need to use a specialist device:
 

MicPort                   

The MicPort boosts the very low level signals that all microphones produce up to line level which can be processed by the computer. Your microphone is plugged into the pre-amp (pre-amplifier), which itself is plugged into the computer's USB port.

The alternative is to use a dedicated USB microphone. There are cheaper and less sophisticated microphones, but their performance can be disappointing. See the sE Electronics USB1000a and USB2200a mics for superb performance and USB ease of use, though even the USB1000a is quite large and they are best for static recording and aren’t suitable for every circumstance.

The laptop needs to have some audio recording software to capture the incoming audio; you might like to try Acoustica (for Windows) or Amadeus (for Macs.) This shareware offers excellent functionality for around $40, far below the cost of fully commercial programs. There is also the free, open source, Audacity which has a growing band of followers.

It’s a highly effective way of getting high quality audio on to a laptop. Once the audio is in the computer you can edit the sound file as easily as a word processor edits words, and write the audio to CD (if you have a CD writer!) See More about digital audio below.

More information

More about digital audio

More about shareware