I I am interested in getting hell on transcribing some original quadraphonic albums such as a king biscuit flower hour to either my computer or burn them as audio CD DVD. I don't know what software I should use or how much hard drive space this would take up I do have a 4 core processor in my machine. I believe I have a multi-channel sound card but I'm not 100% sure. Any help that your members could give me I would appreciate. I am also trying to convert some of the older to 5.1
Hi Walter! I honestly am just beginning to learn the multitrack mastering process myself, but I've done this enough with VHS and AV production to pick up a few tricks. You can absolutely do preservation with just stereo equipment, by doing two tracks at a time. Or, yes, you can use a multichannel input device.
It's more important, if you want to preserve as much quality as you can, to use solid equipment AND to use the right digital settings. The microphone jack on a built-in sound card is not the way you want to do preservation. A USB recording interface, even a relatively cheap one, will be miles better. You'll want to sample at 24 bits with a 192Khz sample rate to preserve as much information as possible from the analog recording. The Behringer UMC404HD would be about the cheapest option to record 4 channels at once without losing a ton of quality.
A 1TB external hard drive will store hundreds of albums if you use the lossless FLAC audio format. You might even get away with 500GB, or you might want to splurge on 2TB. Whichever way, I'd implore you to go with a Western Digital hard drive (not an SSD). I do IT by day, and since we don't have Hitachi's hard drive division anymore, they're the only hard drive manufacturer I trust at all.
As far as converting to 5.1, make sure you've preserved the masters before doing anything like that. Honestly, I don't think it's worth converting 4-channel to 5.1. Software and AV receivers are both more than capable of using algorhythms to redirect vocals to the center channel and bass to the subwoofer in real time.
