Audio Systems: split tracks, female rca, adapter cables

Question
I bought some sunday school song cds that have split tracks.  But I don't know how to obtain the music without the lyrics.  I tried burning a cd and when we played it at church, only the music played, but when I brought it back home to play it here, the lyrics were back on.  What do I need to do?

Answer
Without going to the expense of buying a mixing device you should go to Radio Shack and purchase two RCA 'Y' adapter cables; (one adapter - 2 Female RCA to 1 male) and (one adapter - 1 female RCA to 2 males. Connect the first adapters male to the second adapters female then plug the second cable into both inputs of your recorder. That means that the outputs of your player will be plugged into the remaining two female RCA adapter cable. Essentially you will be combining the two channels to one in mono. You will not be able to control the balance between the music and voice.

Alternately to gain control of the balance you will have to be creative. If you have a preamplifier; instead you can take the stereo outputs of the preamp and combine the left and right using the above RCA adapters. You will plug your player into the selected input of your preamplifier. The output to your recorder. You may then be able to control the balance of voice and music by using the preamplifier balance control. The result should be mono using the same adapters.


An aside: You probably have a non working channel on the church system. As a test you could try playing the copy you already made at home to see if you have both channels. If you do, it means that one channel of the church system is not working and you will need to trace the cables by plugging the working channel into either the system inputs.

If the church system uses a mixer, then once you sort out what is not working you can (instead of the above) plug the left channel of the church player into channel one of the mixer and the right channel of the church player into channel two of the mixer. You will then have dynamic control over the balance of music and voice.