Reclaiming Vinyl

[Nomad V]

Ok, I might be obsessed with it, but things seem to be working pretty well with digitizing my old record collection. I may have a tin ear and others probably can hear the difference in fidelity between the digital copies and the recordings that I'm capturing from my old vinyl records.
I bought one of those Crosley Directors that can record tapes and vinyl albums onto CDs. Then I run the CD through Magix Audio Lab 12. Since I use rewritable CDs there is practically no cost to do the digitization. It has a one click repair button that cuts out most if not all the clicks and scratches on the records, and there are many of them. There was only two old albums that haven't made the cut so far Brain Salad Surgery and Linda Rondstadt. I was just wondering if anyone else has gone through this exercise. If you have, have you done it the same way? For a while I was using a pre-amp that I got from Radio Shack with a Technics turntable, but the turntable was shot so I picked up the device I'm using now. Anyway, I think it seems to be pretty cool. I hadn't heard Uriah Heap in a long time.

 

[Silvercrest]

For tapes, I just got a stereo that had RCA out jacks, and spliced a cable to plug into my computer's audio in jack. While the tape was playing into the computer, I recorded the track as a .wav using CDEX freeware, which has some cleanup features. If I needed to do any editing (like if I accidentally started recording the beginning of the next song), I did that with Wavepad freeware, which lets you clip sections of a track and all sorts of other things. Then I just use CDEX again to convert it into .mp3. (I'm concerned I may have a tin ear myself, but all I can say is they sound fine to me. In most cases, anyway.)

This also works if I like a piece of music from a DVD or TV show. RCA straight from the TV or DVD player into the computer, and convert it.

As far as vinyl is concerned, I don't have a method yet. I have a 25-year-old Sanyo turntable which was only engineered to work with a particular stereo, and that stereo does not have any out jacks other than what goes to the speakers. (For the tapes I had to borrow one that did!) I'm still wondering if I can fiddle with the turntable to make it work with a different stereo, but I don't want to damage it.

 

[ngc7293]

Recently I got one of those ION USB turntables with audio input for a tape player. I have used Audacity to convert the recordings to files. Unfortunately, in order to get song titles and such I have been using iTunes to type in that information before I burn the songs to CD.

Silvercrest: Do you know how CDex compares to Audacity?

 

[ngc7293]

Here is what I did before I got the USB turntable. I had an old turntable with a ground and RCA cables. I used a splitter cable to take that down to a standard headphone jack. If your sound card has an Audio IN use that if not, consider going to a place like Best Buy or an Apple Store and getting an iMic. This is a USB device that works on PC and Mac. The Device has two ports on it. Oddly enough, the microphone port is the one that worked for me.
I'd also experiment with Audacity (free)

 

[Silvercrest]

I think my only experience with Audacity was a year or so ago when I was looking for real-time voice-converting software (if I'm thinking of the right program). It failed to impress. But I don't think I ever racked it up against CDEX. I started doing this about five years ago, and all I had was Win98, and CDEX was one of the only freeware programs that I could get to work. I don't even know if Audacity was around then.

I can tell you that like Audacity, you have to manually enter the track titles on CDEX, which is a pain. Even if you're ripping straight from a CD in the drive. Only once or twice did CDEX ever succeed in reading the tracks straight off a CD and displaying them for me. Surprised the heck out of me, I'll tell you. These days if I do a direct CD rip, I just use Media Player.

Heh. These days CDEX doesn't even run on the machine I'm writing on. Effing Windows Vista. I have to go back to my next-most-recent machine with Win XP to do the sort of ripping I was talking about. I suppose there are better tools out there now (maybe even Audacity!). But I still trust it.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Before my original sound card (Creative) went tits-up, it had the I/O bay in the front of the computer.

That bay had all manner of inputs, including RCA jacks. I just had to get a small pre-amp for my existing turntable.

I used the Creative software that was already installed for ripping the vinyl.

 

[farmkid]

I can tell you that like Audacity, you have to manually enter the track titles on CDEX, which is a pain. Even if you're ripping straight from a CD in the drive. Only once or twice did CDEX ever succeed in reading the tracks straight off a CD and displaying them for me. Surprised the heck out of me, I'll tell you. These days if I do a direct CD rip, I just use Media Player.

Heh. These days CDEX doesn't even run on the machine I'm writing on. Effing Windows Vista. I have to go back to my next-most-recent machine with Win XP to do the sort of ripping I was talking about. I suppose there are better tools out there now (maybe even Audacity!). But I still trust it.

I've used CDex a fair bit, but only for ripping CDs, not for recording. If you put in a CD and click on CDDB>Read Remote CDDB, it will go online and find the CD track information for you. You don't have to type in anything as long as it's a commercially produced CD.

As for other programs, the one I've used the most for recording from analog sources is Nero Wave Editor, which is part of the Nero Suite. Or at least it was...my copy of Nero is pretty old, and I don't know about the newer versions. What I like about it is that it has a noise removal function that does a great job of removing cassette hiss and the like. It's fully customizable too. I had a couple of tapes that had an annoying buzzing at one particular frequency. Using the noise removal tool I was able to find that frequency and get rid of it.

 

[trekkiedane]

I seriously don't remember what kind of software I used when I last digitized vinyl (or indeed; ripped sound off VHS-tapes). Some of it I put through a few filters in a friends Wavelab though.

Physically it was (and still is) rather simple: I, too, just connected a couple of RCA-jacks on my receiver with the audio-in jack on the sound-card (all of my audio-out's (then) were connected to the receiver anyway).

These days I rarely digitize my own vinyls and usually just find the album on-line and DL it instead. Probably a legal grey-area, but I really don't care *(and you can always add crackle and hiss digitally ).

 

[Nomad V]

This link may be of interest. The software I use takes me to it automatically, but it has all the songs on albums, timing for breaks, etc. Here you go...

http://www.freedb.org/

 

[tharpdevenport]

Audacity's recording settings are set at substandard levels. I noticed this when recording stuff and listening to it vs. the original. You'll have to fool around with them, otherwise all that effort and you'll produce something that sounds -- if you can hear it -- inferior to the playing LP.

 

[Silvercrest]

I tried re-downloading the freeware version of WavePad a while back and discovered that it now made substandard conversions any time I edited a file. I don't think you could adjust it, either. Makes sense; they probably want you to buy the real one.

Later I found a copy of my original download (which made normal-sounding conversions), so I could still use that. Whew!