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First and foremost, I am recording from my good sounding 1925 Lexington player piano. This helps a lot. But I would still estimate that about 85 percent of the sound quality is lost in recording this music for the Internet.
First, I put a folded towel on top of the player. On top of the towel I place a good dynamic range microphone facing the back of the player (or soundboard). The player is close to the wall so the sound bounces off the wall and back to the microphone.
The microphone is connected to a twenty-foot-long microphone extension which in turn plugs into the SoundBlaster Awe 64 Gold within my Gateway 2000 Pentium 180 PC.
I use GoldWave to record the sound as a truly huge (13 to 24 megabyte) wav file. The sampling rate is 44,100 Hz, 16-bit, mono. I clip off the ends of the saved, recorded file and then I use only one GoldWave filter--the noise filter--which filters out the low level hum resulting from the microphone being so far from the PC. This really taxes my PC and takes several minutes to accomplish.
Once I have a good wav file, I use RealEncoder to encode the file as a RealMedia file sampled for 28.8 modems. I then upload the file as a streaming audio file. Getting the file to stream involves two files. One is the RealMedia recording file itself and the second file is a pointer file.
Altogether, each recording takes about 20 minutes to complete, from "Rolling the Music" to posting the Web site pointer.
It works remarkably well and I am using very ordinary low-level equipment to do this--except for my amazing player piano!
