AnalogWhole - Make Your Music Library Whole
Remember when you used to make tape recordings of
your 45's and long records? You'd connect the output of your amp into
the input of the tape deck and hit record as soon as
the LP started playing. You could watch the level meters
bounce and make adjustments to make sure they didn't peak out.
Truly old school.
Things are tougher with digital audio. Music is stored in a wide variety of 'codecs.' If you want to transfer from one format to another (i.e. like transferring from an LP to a tape), you need to have a program that can read and write all the various codecs. This is getting to be tougher as the number of codecs used for music storage increases.
The media player that comes with Windows (Windows Media Player) is pretty good about gathering all the codecs necessary to play the myriad of different storage formats. If it doesn't have the codec for a particular format you want to play, it will go out to try and download the format. That's fine, but that's only half the battle, although you can play a music file in Windows Media Player, it doesn't offer the ability to save it into a more common format, such as an MP3.
That's where AnalogWhole comes in. Almost all PC's have a soundcard that has the ability to both play and record music simultaneously. Soundcards also have a built in mixer that allows the sound output channel to be re-routed into the recording input channel. AnalogWhole is able to control Windows Media Player to play pretty much any music format you have stored on your computer. Windows Media Player does the tough job of converting the 1's and 0's particular to that codec the music was stored as into an analog output that is played through the sound card. While the song is playing, AnalogWhole re-routes this analog signal back into the recording input of the sound card. As it is recording the music it stores it as an MP3 file. MP3 is the de-facto standard for music storage. Without exception (almost), all portable media players (i.e. iPod) will play music stored in the MP3 format. By converting your entire music collection to MP3, you are pretty much assured that whatever portable media player you have will play all the music in your library.
So, by using Windows Media Player to do all the hard work of playing music stored with a variety of formats, AnalogWhole allows you to consolidate your music library into one, commonly used music storage format.
Pretty cool, eh?
Things are tougher with digital audio. Music is stored in a wide variety of 'codecs.' If you want to transfer from one format to another (i.e. like transferring from an LP to a tape), you need to have a program that can read and write all the various codecs. This is getting to be tougher as the number of codecs used for music storage increases.
The media player that comes with Windows (Windows Media Player) is pretty good about gathering all the codecs necessary to play the myriad of different storage formats. If it doesn't have the codec for a particular format you want to play, it will go out to try and download the format. That's fine, but that's only half the battle, although you can play a music file in Windows Media Player, it doesn't offer the ability to save it into a more common format, such as an MP3.
That's where AnalogWhole comes in. Almost all PC's have a soundcard that has the ability to both play and record music simultaneously. Soundcards also have a built in mixer that allows the sound output channel to be re-routed into the recording input channel. AnalogWhole is able to control Windows Media Player to play pretty much any music format you have stored on your computer. Windows Media Player does the tough job of converting the 1's and 0's particular to that codec the music was stored as into an analog output that is played through the sound card. While the song is playing, AnalogWhole re-routes this analog signal back into the recording input of the sound card. As it is recording the music it stores it as an MP3 file. MP3 is the de-facto standard for music storage. Without exception (almost), all portable media players (i.e. iPod) will play music stored in the MP3 format. By converting your entire music collection to MP3, you are pretty much assured that whatever portable media player you have will play all the music in your library.
So, by using Windows Media Player to do all the hard work of playing music stored with a variety of formats, AnalogWhole allows you to consolidate your music library into one, commonly used music storage format.
Pretty cool, eh?