This is going to be more expensive than two pennies'/cents' worth, but I
thought I'd add to the sound processing thread by outlining an easier -- in
the off-the-shelf sense -- approach:
I assume that if you have a Mac, life is so easy that you need read no
further ;)
A standard WindowsXP machine includes sound in/out on the hardware side. I
don't know whether any of the magazines have done a serious test of the
quality you're likely to get, but not so long ago it was pretty poor. So you
might want to add a sound card such as a member of the M-Audio Delta range,
though the new E-Mu 1212-M (esp when bundled with the Emulator X sampler)
looks pretty attractive, and is a bit cheaper.
Both have (at the minimum) stereo in/out, and can take input from minidisk,
cassette deck etc. For better-than-basic audio input, you might want to add
the MXL Desktop Recording Kit.
On the software side, the best native Windows all-round music/audio app is
Cakewalk Sonar. However, for audio processing Adobe Audition has some
valuable features, including a very good noise-filtering utility. Both
output to a variety of formats, including MP3 of course, though Audition
doesn't do Real Audio.
Obviously (I suppose) all this gear is primarily intended for music. It
intrigues me, the relative evaluations of recording quality people make for
spoken word as opposed to music.
P
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