Digitizing Vinyl - share your tips and experiences, please!

I am posting this in hopes of hearing from people who have actually DONE this. Not people who say "why bother to do it?" What have you tried, and what worked well and what didn't? I've done a bit of it with a standalone CD burner, so I am already very familiar with the pros and cons of THAT particular solution. I would like to explore some alternatives.

I began by reading about USB turntables, and many people warn against these. Have any of you found one which isn't a piece of junk and gives good results? That sort of "all in one" solution seems a bit too good to be true - but I'd love to be wrong about that.

I own a fairly nice turntable as well as several Windows computers. If I end up trying a software solution, I would prefer to use our XP laptop, but this may not be realistic in terms of what software is currently available and will actually work. I have even considered recording from the stereo (there is a small mixer built into our stereo setup) into my Edirol R-09. No matter what method I use, there will be pros and cons, and it will be fiddly. Accepting this as a reality is part of what it takes to consider doing this in the first place.

So....enough background on me. What have *you* tried, and what do you advise?

I ripped about a hundred several years ago. I took the headphone-out of a standard turntable/receiver setup, sent the signal through a 1/8 to 1/4 stereo splitter, plugged the L and R signals into line level inputs on the A/D converter, set the levels on the interface, clicked record on the DAW and started the record player. Come back 20 minutes later, stop the DAW, bounce to one stereo wav, open up the wav file and split on silence to separate the album into songs, encode as mp3 and add appropriate tags.

Having done this, here are my lessons learned.

1) Vinyl quality is very important. If it's got a lot of surface noise, scratches etc. the end result will fill you with nostalgia and not joy.

2) It takes a long time. You record in real time, splitting the tracks is non-trivial, and you have to manually enter the mp3 tags.

3) It is a PITA. Coming back every 20 minutes was annoying, and I realized that most of the music I was ripping was already available in digital form for a small fee on music subscription services.

YMMV

I used the tape out of my HiFi receiver, my 1978 Technics turntable with Grado cartridge, MOTU interface and Sonar recording application. It takes about an hour to do an album, which includes separating the songs and a bit of cleanup of the recording. (pop and click removal etc.) If you really care about doing it right, you could spend a couple of hours or more with just the cleanup.

In my opinion, it is only worthwhile for albums not available on CD or MP3 that you want in one of those formats. If your time is worth more than $15 per hour, you won't save money by doing it yourself when there is an alternative.

I've actually done quite a few from my vinyl collection, primarily so I can listen to them in my car or elsewhere. Plus I have a lot of stuff you either can't buy on CD or just plain don't feel like buying again (not to mention some are remaster disasters on CD).

My studio PC is near my stereo. I run RCA connectors from the tape outs on my stereo pre amp (which has built in phono preamps) and connect them to my mixer. The mixer goes to my sound card on the studio PC.

To record, I use BIAS Sound Saver, which is pretty cheap and works pretty well. It has a timed recording feature, so you can set the time for a bit longer than the album side. You can then choose to 'append' to that recording, so you can get side 2 in the same file. Then it has a 'clean up' function, that does a pretty good job of getting rid of surface noise and pops, though that'll depend on how bad the record is. I've always been anal about cleaning mine every time, so they're in decent shape. Even so, some are better than others.

The biggest challenge is defining the individual songs. Sound Save has a function to automatically do that, but I've rarely been able to get this to work well, so do it by manually selecting them from the waveform display. You can name them and save as either wave files or mp3, whatever.

I used to use Nero to do the recording and BIAS Sound Soap or Sound Soap Pro for cleanup, but the Sound Saver puts it all in one place and it works well enough for me. I wouldn't want to sit and do it all day, but it gets the job done.

I bought an Audio Technica AT-LP2D USB turntable to digitize some of my mother's extensive vinyl collection. It came with Audacity and the required drivers for my Mac. The phono preamp is built in. It's simple to use and worked great right out of the box. I'm not some kind of hi-fi snob though so I can't offer an opinion on how it sounds, other than to say, to my ears, it sounds great. Sounds just like I remember listening to that collection growing up. It was very afforable (around $100 if I remember right.) Too bad it's discontinued.

However I do see you can still find them on Ebay, and you can still read all the reviews on the item at Amazon if you're interested. I'm not selling mine though!

No worries, there are lots of good reasons for digitizing your vinyl.

I'd skip the all-in-one units. They'd have to be super expensive to be much good, and with such a small market ... nope. Especially since you have a good turntable. I assume you also already have a good phono preamp -- e.g., the one built into your stereo. Use that and the record outputs on the stereo.

Definitely give your Eiderol a try. I don't know whether it can act as a USB soundcard; many portable recorders can. If so, do that. If not, just let it record (to 24-bit WAV) and import the results. Make sure the recording hits the sweet spot, with peaks within 3 to 6 dB of 0dBFS, with no clipping. Every 6dB you're under 0 by wastes one bit of your 20. (Yes, it's a 24-bit recorder, but the bottom 4 bits are noise.) You do have a bit to waste, maybe even two, but why waste them? A tiny bit of clipping shouldn't matter either, but it's hard to tell if you have too much so don't accept any. Hopefully your recorder gives you this info.

The alternative to the Eiderol is an audio interface aka soundcard. There are lots of threads on that. IMHO, any decent one will do a very good job, and there are decent ones for as little as $100 or so.

If you don't have any digital audio workstation software, you can use Audacity (free open-source) or Reaper multitrack DAW (free trial), or pretty much any DAW software you can get your hands on. You don't need a full-featured multitrack DAW, but it won't hurt if that's what you end up with. You can do mastering in a DAW, or use a program intended for mastering. Either is probably overkill for your application. Many soundcards come with DAW software; if you buy one, just use whatever came with it.

That's the recording step. The next steps are chopping and mastering.

I don't know how folks chop a long recording into songs, suitable for burning on CD, so that you can forward to the next track. I suspect this might be a built-in tool on some mastering programs. You can do this before or after mastering -- it shouldn't matter. If there isn't a tool, you have to do it manually, which is a little tedious but no big deal. The technique would depend on what software you're using.

Nothing wrong with Win XP. Any software you'd want should support it.

Now, mastering. This is the step where you can impose your preferences on the result, and make a big difference (for good or evil, depending on what you do and who you ask and what your goals are).

The first step in mastering is to normalize, so that the highest peaks reach 0 dB FS (or just under it).

The next steps are optional.

If you want the levels to be similar to other CDs so the tracks can be used in shuffle mode on your playlists, you'll probably need to apply compression and limiting to get the levels up similar to your CDs. The appropriate level varies a LOT among genres, but in general CDs are hotter if they're more recent (since 2000) and less hot going back from that. It's due to a stupid volume war where everyone loses, especially the customer, and it's a sore subject that I won't go further into here. Suffice it to say that modern CDs are a bit squashed (peaks reduced, low level parts raised, so it's loud overall). If you don't do some limiting and compression, the results won't mix well with CD tracks. For more info see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war.

Limiting is rounding off and reducing the peaks -- many peaks are isolated and sharp, and reducing them doesn't make an audible difference. When you limit, you generally also boost the level to compensate for what gets rounded off, so the result is a louder signal with little loss of audible fidelity.

Compressing is making the louder bits a bit quieter and the quieter parts a bit louder -- squashing the dynamics. When done tastefully (which many will say is impossible) it makes a mix clearer in the ears without sacrificing the true dynamics of the piece. When taken too far (which is very popular these days) it smooshes the life out of the CD and makes it annoying to listen to for any length of time.

These are two tools to get a mix loud enough to mix with typical CD tracks. You generally can't get there with just limiting (too much squash and you'll definitely hear it, and not like it).

If you're making CDs to listen to in the car, where the ambient noise floor is high, it helps to compress it a bit more than you otherwise might, for material that's very dynamic (and not already squashed). I have a few CDs I like to listen to in the car but have to keep cranking or reducing the level, so I compressed them and reburnt them and bingo: great crusing tunes.

Normally, mastering also involves a lot of steps for turning a mixed album into a cohesive whole, but you shouldn't need to worry about any of that, unless you want to change the harmonic balance or apply mastering reverb because you think more would be cool.

The point I'm making here is that merely recording the album is just the first step; there's more to it. How much more is up to you, but at the very least you need to chop and normalize.

Normalizing is a feature that should be built into any audio software (e.g., DAW, wave editor, mastering software).

Limiting and compression is built into many, and there are also a lot of plugins you can get for the purpose. Some are even free or free to try. One in the latter category that I find very useful for limiting is PeakCompresor.

The last mastering step is rendering to 16-bit format. Then you're ready to burn to CD or convert to MP3 or whatever.

Record at a sample rate of 44.1Khz unless your target is DVDs (in which case, use 48kHz).

By all in one, are you thinking of the little Ion USB players? I bought one and ended up taking it back. It was pretty cheaply built, so I never even plugged it in once I got a look at it.

1. make each vinyl dust free before digitizing

2. use any cinch stereo output of your hi-fi amp to your stereo input of your computer audio interface

3. start you recoding software, i.e. WaveLab LE

4. look for the loudest passage on the vinyl and adjust the recording level at your audio software input channel to not go over 0 dBFS peak (a head room of 3 dB is good setting), then leave the input gain at this position for all further vinyls for loudness continuity

5. hit the recording button

* play your vinyls eventually wet to further reduce noises

I have tried this method only with failure resulting from error in design of turntable. Perhaps I should make watertight enclosure?

There is a software online called Click Repair. It's not free, but it is amazing at taking out any ticks and pops that might exist on the LPs you rip without degrading the sound quality..

wet: arm with cleaning liquid

I have a small phono preamp I use. Connect that to my DAW.

I use Cool edit for recording, editing and cleanup. If the song has

allot of scratches, cool edit has a noise plugin that will remove some of the pops.

Its not going to remove them all nor make the playback pristine sounding. it cant replace the

music in back of the click or pop because its missing, but it can make it less offensive.

Depending on the song I may use a limiter instead of normalizing. you can always normalize when burning a CD.

The tracks dont sound as good as a CD burn of course. Theres allot lost when the music is transfered to vinyl

and converting it to a digital format doesnt help. If you're real serious about performing RX you can record to a

higher sample format like 24/96 then use something like Izotope RX to fix pops and noise. I wouldnt be the one to have to

do that unless I was being paid well if theres allot of scratches. For capturing rare tracks its fine. For other stuff, its easire to

pay a buck and download a good quality version.

I have done many albums since the earley days when CD burners became cheap enough to buy.

The process isnt hard but can become tedious if you have to do allot of transfers.

What unit is that???

I still use a Discwasher cleaner with the D4 fluid, and a lightweight arm they made many years ago; nowhere near the quality of that one.

I use a Sony turntable that has USB out as well as phono plugs. It came with a lite version of Sony Audio Forge which is useful for doing the recording. It has a built in process for doing basic noise cleanup and normalizing levels. If the vinyl isn't in too bad a shape it works well. I have a number of well-used LPs that are pretty much beyond salvation so they have to have a track that I really want and can't get elsewhere before I will digitize them. I don't transfer many complete albums, usually just 4 - 6 tracks, so I probably wouldn't buy a replacement CD - I've already done that for the recordings I really want complete. It is a time consuming process, though, as others have mentioned. I have about 200 vinyl albums, some from 45 years ago, some I've purchased at yard sales or thrift shops in the last couple of years. It is nice to rediscover things that moved you at some point in time but are not available any more.

The model for wet cleaning is: Reinigungsarm SLIDER - II

The model for dry cleaning is: Reinigungsarm SLIDER

Both are here:

http://www.qas-audio.de/html/slider.html

http://www.qas-audio.de/html/body_bilder.html

It depends on your goal. Basically there are two parts to the job, playing the record and recording the turntable output. Since you said "vinyl" I assume these are LPs or 45s, and not 78s. 78s have a whole subset of playing issues from speed to stylus size to equalization.

Think of the turntable like you would a microphone. The better one you have, the better the source you'll be recording. But like microphones, there's a "good enough for my purposes" limit that you need not exceed. People who buy $20,000 turntables want to play the phonograph records and don't want anything to do with that digital stuff. On the other hand, if you use a junker turntable, that will be the thing that limits how good your digitized version of the record is. It's really easy to accurately digitize flutter and rumble.

There are a few turntables that have a built-in equalized preamp, A/D converter, and have a USB connector for connecting directly to a computer, eliminating a separate piece of hardware. A few of them are pretty good, some are not very good turntables. The electronics part is cheap, so you can judge the quality of a "USB turntable" by price pretty much the same as one that has a standard phono cartridge output. Audio Technica generally does a good job with this, but stay away from the $79 ones that you can buy at Best Buy and places like that. With or without USB, you should plan to spend at least $250 for a turntable and cartridge. That seems to be about the price point where they get above the "record player" class. Is this what you already own?

There are expensive (and not too expensive) dedicated phono preamps, but unless you're going to spend a good bit of time with each record playing with optimizing the sound once you've digitized it, a standard home stereo receiver with a phono input and Tape output will do just fine for this.

If you're happy listening to what you already have (which, I assume means you already have the preamp too) then you can dive into the world of digital audio interfaces for your computer.

Either of those approaches will work. I would suggest not using the laptop's built-in sound card to get the analog audio from your preamp or receiver into the computer. They're getting better, but $100 will buy you a respectable stereo interface that connects to the computer with USB. You may be able to use the Edirol R-90 for this if it has a "USB microphone" function. Or just pull out the memory card, transfer the files to your computer, and go to town polishing the music.

There are many programs that will let you edit the files, adjust levels, fiddle with EQ, some offer noise reduction, and you can spend as much time with each recording as you want.

Now, honestly, I've done this, but I'm really in the "why bother?" camp. It takes a lot of time to do the job really well. I've made digital copies of records that are no longer available for friends and the occasional single song, but I don't spend so much time listening to my own collection that I can't pull a record out of the jacket, put it on the turntable, sit on the couch with a glass of wine, and just enjoy it as it is. You may have a different goal.

I have a friend who had two kids that are about the right age to start appreicating "his" misic (Beatles era) and he's taken to having listening sessions with his kids where they'll play one or two records together, and as long as the record is going to be played and listened to anyway, records it on his computer so it'll be there if he ever wants to massage it further. To me, that's a sensible plan. But I dont' think I'll live long enough to spend a couple of evenings a week digitizing my collection (if I'm doing a good job it'll take me about 2-3 hours per record). Who'll appreciate it when I'm gone?

A second hand $50 to $300 turntable will sound as good as a $20'000 turntable, when you know what model to buy. A Bentley Continental GT however is slightly something else then a Vespa.

In case you decide for a $20'000 model, don't forget to spend another $25'000 for a custom made needle, which doesn't sound better then a $59 Shure.

I still recommend using stand-alone CD recorders, but the kind you use will make a big difference. I prefer Pioneer, or pro models made by Pioneer, such as the HHB CDR850 and Fostex CR300. These models are about ten years old now, but I

Now that is cool! I had never even heard of such a thing. I always used to wash my discs with a light soapy solution and use a very soft toothbrush to clean out the grooves before rinsing off and patting dry between a folded soft towel.

But that puppy looks awesome!! The wet arm, NOT your avatar...although that puppy looks pretty cool also.

Okay you can get back to pissing me off now Mess. Alberto Du Wett-Tonearmio.:lol:

Huh! crazy bestard,

just keep on the good work, one day it will pay out, however that will not happen in the field of comedy.

Here's a program that has saved me a lot of time over the years: Singulator

It automatically records each track into a separate file.

Downside: It won't let you download from a Win7 PC. It won't let you type in the artist & album name and download the song list. So, the search goes on...

If you are a skillful (and very patient) practitioner of iZotope AUDIO RX, you can really breathe amazing new clarity into your digital rips from vinyl. Unless (as some people do) you have sentimental attraction to the pops, clicks and hiss of your favorite old vinyl.

A bit OT, but if vinyl were to be played at 78 rpm recorded into the software, it would speed up the time required to digitize.

Then slow it down in software?

take a hell of a lot less time than 33 1/3