Cleaning ripped vinyl

Well, I ripped me some vinyl, and as far as I can tell, the input quality was 24-bit 48000 hz lightly compressed audio. It came from the record after about 4-5 previous plays and a basic roller-rubbing alcohol cleaning. I went with 96000 hz 32-bit float quality so that editing will have as little loss as possible, especially since my player is about 2% too fast.

I think the first thing to do would be to use an expander to restore the audio to its original state before compression, and to reduce noise. Then, I would do just enough noise reduction to make it non-intrusive. After cutting the tracks into songs with 0.2 seconds at the start, I would look through each song and remove all pops and clicks that annoy me with the repair tool. Since songs that are thought to become more popular are often made louder just for effect, I would find a similar sample of voice in each song and make sure it is at the same level in each song. Finally, I would apply an eq to naturally round off all frequencies that would not appear in the original format and save all of my songs as 6-quality 16-bit 44100 hz flac.
Does this sound viable?

Rubbing alcohol - bad idea. “Rubbing alcohol” often contains a bit of oil so the “rubbing” is easier. Alcohol is not good for vinyl anyway. Use distilled water.

There are lots of threads here about ripping vinyl, and lots of opinions on the best work flow.

– Bill

See this (someway down) thread for Bill’s workflow: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Tutorial_-_Copying_tapes,_LPs_or_minidiscs_to_CD and page 2 of the thread for pdxrunner’s comments.

See this tutorial from the 1.3 manual: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Sample_workflow_for_LP_digitization

Bill and I (and several others on this forum) prefer to use Brian Davies’ excellent ClickRepair to get rid of clicks and pops. I costs $40 but is well worth it IMHO. It is easy to use and does an excellent job. See this sticky thread: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/click-pop-removal-clickrepair-software/1933/1

WC