When you record audio material from a CD using the Read track utility DART CD-Recorder Basic saves selected tracks in separate files. However, when you record from an analog source, such as phonograph or a tape deck, the situation is different. In order to save different pieces in separate files you have to repeat the recording procedure for each analog track which means: evoke the Record dialog, choose record parameters, select the name of the destination soundfile, start playback, start recording, stop recording, stop playback etc. Pretty annoying!
If you have enough space on your hard disc there is another way of 'unpacking' audio collections: record the entire LP (or contents of one side of a cassette), then divide it into separate tracks using the Unpack utility.
To initialize unpacking select the audio file (WAV or MP3) you would like to partition and evoke the Unpack dialog by means of clicking the UNPACK
button situated on the toolbar or by selecting the Unpack command from the List menu. File partitioning is preceded by searching for silences of a specific duration (anything between 0.5 and 5 seconds). Since the silence detector must be told how 'silent' the silence is supposed to be you have to set the detection threshold appropriately. The selection (anything between 1 and 1000) should be made in accordance with the recording level and intensity of background noise. If the threshold is too low detector may fail to localize silences between subsequent tracks; if it is too high silent parts of the recording may be mistakenly classified as breaks.
In case there is a piece of silence at the beginning of the recording, even if it is fairly short, press the Find button situated next to the detection threshold box and the value of the threshold will be adjusted automatically.
After setting the minimum separation time and detection threshold click the Process button. When detection is finished the Verify cuts dialog will appear on the screen allowing you to accept or reject the proposed cuts. The total number of suggested cuts is displayed at the top of the dialog. After selecting the cut number in the Current cut group you can listen to a short fragment of the recording centered around the proposed cut position and, if necessary, remove the cut from the list by clicking the Reject button. If the results are unsatisfactory, i.e. there are too many omissions or too many false detections press the Cancel button and run the silence detection utility again with a lower or higher detection threshold, respectively.
If all cuts on the revised list are acceptable choose the destination directory and the names of the files under which different tracks will be stored (use the Change button in the Output group for this purpose). Then press the Process button to start unpacking.
NOTICE
The presence of clicks, pops and record scratches, which is typical of material coming from old analog records, makes silence detection considerably more difficult and a bit tricky. Therefore, even though the silence detector was designed so as to be robust against outliers it may fail to localize breakpoints correctly if the click intensity is too high.
Unpack can be used to process MPEG files. All steps are in this case identical with the steps described above, except that the input (compressed) file format is not preserved – the results of unpacking are saved in separate wave files.