Ken,
The only way the AR can record directly within the organ is to a floppy disk. Knowing that a CD holds 700MB, when I bought my organ I just wondered how much of a song you could get on a floppy, which is 1.44MB. And the answer is
a whole CDs worth. This is because the floppy is a DATA disk, not an AUDIO disk. In other words, when you hear eg. a Saxophone being played from the floppy disk there is no information about the saxophone sound actually on the disk. The floppy disk sends a message to the organ saying, "Right, we want to hear this particular saxophone now" and it is the software in the organ that generates the sound we hear. So you can't 'play' the floppy on a computer as the computer doesn't have the AR's sound generators in it.
Basically, Kathryn has to record from the LINE OUT under her organ, which of course she could do 'live' as she is playing. But only having one pair of hands she first records to the floppy disk in the organ; then she plays that back and has two hands free to do the recording from the LINE OUT.
This is how
I do it on
my AR80 organ. I take leads from the LINE OUT under my organ (RCA plugs, or PHONO plugs as they are sometimes called) ..
.. and plug the other end into an Audio Interface,
This is the one
I have.
The Behringer UCA202The purpose of this (as you can see from the picture) is that the output from it is a USB .. which I plug into my laptop. I have downloaded Audacity onto my laptop and that picks up the STEREO input from the USB port. I then record to WAV files and put them onto a CD,
Kathryn has a laptop too, but as she is not a computer person, she got an engineer from her local computer shop to come to her house (this was in the days
before Covid!) and he downloaded a program to put that STEREO signal from the Audio Interface directly onto a CD in the CD/DVD Drive of her laptop. And he set all the volumes up etc. So all she has to do is to switch everything on, start the CD recorder recording and play her songs from the floppy disk.
How do
you record
your music from
your EL700 organ?
To answer your second question, Kathryn's CD files all end in
.cda.
The CDA file extension is a data format known as CD Audio Track Shortcut. CDA files are small (44 bytes) virtual file created by Microsoft Windows CD driver for each track on an audio CD. They contain indexing information such as track times plus a special Windows shortcut that allows users to access the specific audio tracks. They do not contain music, instead point to where the music is located on the CD. These files instruct the computer which audio track to play on a CD. CDA files will not play when separated from the CD they represent. Converting CDA files is called ripping, which is copying music from a CD onto a computer. These files can be converted to WAV, MP3 etc.
You
can do this using Windows Media Player, but I have a program from NCH Software called
SWITCH for doing this. I highlight all the
.cda tacks on the CD, choose
.mp3 as the format to convert to, give SWITCH a Folder Name to put the files into, click Convert .. and in a couple of minutes all the MP3 tracks are in the folder ready for me to upload into BOX.
Hugh