I have 2 wav songs that my band wants to make a 7" vinyl record of. How can we use Audacity to create a audio-master that will be accepted for vinyl-pressing? Are there any tutorials on this?
Not that I know of. Not many people make vinyl these days.
You will need to make a high quality recording and export as a WAV file.
Ask the company that will be doing the pressing what format they prefer.
Audacity supports bit depths of 16/24/32 bit and standard sample rates of 44.1 / 48 / 96kHz.
Here’s a couple of links to info on vinyl mastering:
http://emusician.com/tutorials/mastering_vinyl/
http://www.recordingmag.com/resources/resourceDetail/114.html
It’s too bad your mix is done, because one of the things that everyone seems to agree on is that the bass frequencies (especially kick drum and bass guitar) need to be mixed to the centre.
You will need to compress your mix. The noise floor on vinyl is significantly higher than on a CD, so you’ll need to bring the quiet passages up somewhat. You’ll also need to control the peaks, so that the needle won’t jump out of the groove (or just plough through the peaks). Chris’s Dynamic Compressor http://pdf23ds.net/software/dynamic-compressor/ is a tool that many people seem to like. It has the advantage that is uses “look-ahead” to anticipate the peaks, thus doing a better job of “levelling” the mix.
For a 7" 45rpm single the songs need to be short. Probably under 4 minutes tops. Otherwise the volume on the 45 will have to be reduced (to fit more grooves on the side), and some turntables may have trouble playing it.
Hope this helps.
– Bill
While it is true that CD has a greater dynamic range than vinyl, this fact does not make a compelling reason for applying dynamic compression to the mix. A good clean vinyl record has a SNR in the region of 80dB which is likely to be more than enough for any recording. During the decline of vinyl as the dominant format for popular music and the advent of the CD format, the use of dynamic compression has increased dramatically - but this has more to do with reasons of style than technical limitations. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war ). If anything it is arguably more important to use dynamic compression on CDs than on vinyl as it is far more likely that a CD will be played in a car.
I’ve recorded in vinyl too.
Basically there’s no special things you must do ahead, if just ordinary clean-up and mastering been done with those tracks. Certainly theres peculiar process for vinyl which is called “pre-emphasis”. But I think that is the deal of production side. If you interested and want to do by yourself, try google with “pre-emphasis / de-emphasis”.
“Should we do compression?”
I’ll say yes but no. In many music there are the spikes which are short term explosion of amplitude caused by percussive instruments". We can limit or compress those. They are unnecessary for our ears. Besides, they lower overall volume of the tracks as you know. This is the matter for not just vinyl (but for CD). It’s just one of the ordinary cleanup. But I would do that and normalize the track. So, I say yes. Also, about aggressive compression like the second guy said…, I don’t think it indispensable, of course. Just a common sense, isn’t it? It will narrows our music’s dynamic range by contrary.
(Speaking of ordinary clean up, have you done with truncating super low frequency, removing DC ham, correcting DC offset, e.t.c, just in case?)
You can forget about “dynamic rang” “S/N” and all those armchair theory things, unless your band was orchestra and played classical music. Vinyl is narrower than CD in dynamic range but wider in frequency and has original taste. I think It’ll do for your music. Just have fun!!!