ZEPP Country Music, Inc.

P.O. Box 306
4 East Third St.
Wendell, NC 27591-0306
Local: 919-365-5189 or Call Toll Free within USA: 866-365-5189

The Studio:
• The Microphone: I use a Radio Shack 33-3013 lavaliere microphone. As can be seen in the photo, it is quite small, and comes with a clip to atttach it to your shirt, tie, or chest hairs. It cost ca. $35 in 2002.
• The Stand: That pencil in the photo above isn't just for scale; I use it as a boom to extend the microphone out near the instrument for recording--its non-business end is stuck in the Blue Books I keep handy.

The Computer End:
• I was initially running CoolEdit 2000 unders Windows XP. (Unfortunately, the company that developed CoolEdit 2000 sold their products to Adobe, and CoolEdit 2000 is no longer available or supported. Adobe does sell "Audition" which is, essentially, CoolEdit Pro, but a trashed hard drive in Oct. 2004 and no support for CoolEdit forced me to spend the bucks to "upgrade" to Adobe Audition.)
• The microphone was initially plugged into the stock SoundBlaster soundcard that came with my now-defunct Dell, and is currently plugged into whatever sound card is in the emachine that I bought to replace the Dell.
• Recording quality: I record in monaural at 48000 Hz and a 32-bit sample rate.
• Editing: Other than running the CoolEdit/Audition noise reduction feature to get rid of the fluorescent light and soda machine noise, I don't do anything to the recordings
• MP3s: To reduce file size, I ultimately save the MP3s at 64 Kbps.

That's it, folks...no big whoop.