How do I capture cassettes to CAN8?
One of the more confusing areas of CAN-8 setup and configuration is found in regards to recording external sources.
When dealing with multimedia on a Windows platform you will often hear the term “MCI”. MCI stands for Media Control Interface. It was Microsoft’s plan to give users a uniformed set of dialogs in order to manage multimedia devices such as video cards, audio cards, and video capture devices.
Newer generations of audio cards operate in what is called “full duplex”. This means that the cards can record AND playback at the same time. This also means that both recording and playback have seperate controls available.
Most users know how to adjust the playback volume from the system tray. Instead of left clicking on the small speaker icon, let us right click and choose “Open Volume Control”.
Now a new dialog window will appear. This is the “Play Control”. This series of controls allows you to select and adjust the playback volume for a number of devices on your system.
In the image above, we have chosen to mute the Microphone and Line-In devices. We would unmute these if we wanted to listen to the sources while recording. These settings ONLY affect the playback volume levels.
To move to the recording control dialogs, we will choose “Options” and then properties.
In the “Properties” dialog, we will choose “Recording” in the “Adjust volume for..” section.
Now we will want to select “Microphone” and “Line-In” so that they show up on the next series of dialogs.
Click “OK” to return to control dialogs. The dialog now says “Recording Control” at the top. This dialog controls the source and volume levels of the selected source. On Student workstations, the microphone will be the selected recording source.
For a content creation workstation, the microphone or the line in could be selected depending on the type of content being created.
