Capturing analog audio

If you want to use audio that isn’t yet in digital form (for example, from an analog cassette or a live microphone), you need to digitize it through an audio or audio/video digitizer/capture card.

The quality of digitized audio and the size of the audio file depend on the sample rate (the number of samples per second) and bit depth (the number of bits per sample) of the digitized audio. Also, stereo audio requires twice as much disk space as mono audio. These parameters, controlled in the Capture section of the Project Settings dialog box, determine how precisely the analog audio signal is represented in digital form. Higher sample rates and bit depths reproduce sound at higher levels of quality, but with correspondingly larger file sizes. Capture audio at the highest quality settings your computer can handle, even if those settings are higher than the settings you’ll specify for final export or playback. This provides headroom, or extra data, that helps preserve quality when you adjust audio gain or apply audio effects such as equalization or dynamic range compression/expansion. Although the DV format can record two independent stereo audio pairs, Adobe Premiere Pro can capture only one stereo pair. It may be possible to select either stereo pair 1, stereo pair 2, or a mix of both, depending on the DV hardware you use. For details, see the documentation for the DV hardware.