Sound Recording App - where to start?

recording app

Hey all, my first post here at edaboard.com, am really glad I found you all : )

The basics of my application are:

Creating multiple 'toys',
Each can Record a sound, store it, then play it back in a loop
Through user input (via buttons and potentiometers), the sound is edited (ie reverb, distortion etc).

The sound needs to be of a reasonable quality, so the hack jobs i've seen so far won't cut it. I've been playing around a lot with Arduino, but I don't believe that it is strong enough.

Basically I need to know where to start. Any thoughts?

audio record with dspic

First you'll need to determine what quality sound you need - the number of bits, and the sample rate. I've done applications where we used recorded audio for prompting in automotive entertainment applications, and 8-bit at 8HKz was adequate. I've also done appliccations for animal calls and used 12-bit at 16KHz.

As to the hardware, you'll need the following:
- Analog front-end and Analog-to-Digital converter to sample the sound and convert it to digital.
- A uController to read the A/D, monitor the user inputs, process the sound and ouput it. You'll probably need a DSP to handle the task of processing the sound. You may want to look at Microchips dsPIC processors (**broken link removed**). I've used these for similar audio processing applications
- Memory to stored the converted sound samples
- A Digital-to-Analog converter and aduio back-end to convert the modified digital sound to analog

arduino sound rec

Woah, so it sounds like it's possible, but I would have no idea what you just meant haha. Thanks heaps!

Do you know of any good starter tutorials on how to get going with this stuff? The arduino stuff I have been using is self contained and I didn't have to know much at all, I really need to learn the basics here.

Cheers

Sound Recording App

Microchip has a Starter kit available for their dsPIC processors that would be a good platform to start with - it's about $60. They also have a User's Guide for the kit on-line that you can download before buying. It includes an example of how to record and playback audio - a good starting point for your project. The page for this product is at:
**broken link removed**