Hi all.
I have several hundred albums and am considering purchasing a turntable to transfer to mp3 files. The one I’m looking at has the audacity software with it. I have win7 and am wondering if this a big hassle. Does the Audacity software let me reduce crackles and pops on the records? Basically reducing noise without losing music quality. How easy is it to use the software?
Doe’s anyone have recommendations on turntables? I’m looking for something under $200.
thanks,
dave
If you buy a turntable, I’d recommend buying one with a line-level output.
For detailed advice, have a look at the following pages:
How to Record Vinyl Records into a Computer
WHAT DOES THE PHONO/LINE SWITCH MEAN ON AUDIO-TECHNICA TURNTABLES?
The Top 5 Best Recommended Turntables and Stereo Systems
BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO RECORDING / RIPPING VINYL INTO YOUR COMPUTER
HTH.
Robert
am wondering if this a big hassle.
Yes.
No question. This is going to take months of work and constant attention to detail with no guarantee you’re going to get the best possible work. That and the current round of USB turntables are designed to be thrown out, not given to your sons or daughters in perpetuity. They’re usually awful. The turntables, not the sons and daughters.
It is recommended to get your existing good quality turntable serviced and buy a digital interface rather than a USB turntable.
Without question the most straightforward thing to do is buy digital versions of the music. The only way you would be forced into doing it yourself is if you have music with no digital version or is out of print everywhere.
I note a new Apple product that makes your music easily available across all your players and devices…at a monthly cost. Effectively renting your music back to you. I see in the latest iTunes upgrade, all my music has a "cloud’ icon next to it. I suspect Apple is volunteering to hold it all for me so I don’t have to clutter up my hard drive.
And digital music sounds terrific (so to speak), but understand you need to keep it on at least two storage devices and regularly roll it forward as the devices fail or go out of service. See: Jazz Drives.
And don’t use MP3. MP3 is a compressed format that causes music distortion—and you can’t stop it. Save music in WAV which takes much more digital storage. MP3 reads good on the tin—music with small files—but isn’t “free.”
Don’t throw out that vinyl.
Koz
Robert, thanks.
Robert and Koz…thanks for the replies. I know it’s going to take me a while. Ask my wife how long it takes me to do projects. I’m still just considering what to do. I have no timetable. I won’t throw any of these out either.
Audacity is open source and free and it works with any hardware/drivers that work with Windows, so it doesn’t matter if it’s included or not. And by the time the consumer receives the CD, there is a often new version available for download.
Doe’s anyone have recommendations on turntables? I’m looking for something under $200.
See [u]Knowzy.com[/u] for lots of turntable information & recommendations.
The most important thing is to [u]avoid ceramic cartridges[/u].
USB turntables are “ready to go”, and virtually all of them have line-level outputs in case you want to plug it into your stereo. With a “traditional” hi-fi turntable, you’d have to add a cartridge, preamp, and USB interface.
If you have a desktop/tower computer with a regular soundcard you can plug the preamp into the soundcard’s line inputs and you don’t need the USB interface. And/or you can buy a USB interface with the phono preamp built-in. Or if you have an older stereo receiver with a phono input, it has a phono preamp built-in and you can connect the tape-outputs to line-in on your soundcard.
I have win7 and am wondering if this a big hassle. How easy is it to use the software?
It’s not hard after you get it set up and learn to use it. 
Some people seem to have trouble selecting the USB turntable as the [u]recording device[/u] and you’ll have to learn how to make separate files for each song. And if you want MP3, you have to install the optional LAME MP3 encoder. (Knowzy doesn’t seem to like Audacity.) But, you’ll have to learn those things with any software. There are several [u]helpful tutorials[/u] in the Audacity Manual and you can help here on the forum.
Does the Audacity software let me reduce crackles and pops on the records? Basically reducing noise without losing music quality.
Audacity and other software can help… You can definitely make some improvement but almost anything you do has the potential for introducing artifacts (side-effects) so if you want the best quality buy the CDs or MP3s. (MP3 is lossy compression but with high-quality settings the compression artifacts are usually inaudible and never as bad as analog vinyl.*
Audacity has 3 “effects” for noise reduction -
Noise Reduction (for reducing constant background hum & hiss).
Click Removal (for automatically reducing loud clicks)
Repair (for removing clicks & pops that you find & select manually)
[u]This Page[/u] has links to specialized vinyl clean-up software and tons of other information abut digitizing vinyl. [u]Click Repair[/u] and [u]Wave Corrector[/u] are popular and affordable automatic de-clickers. [u]Wave Repair[/u] is a manual de-clicker that only touches the audio where you identify a defect, and it does an audibly perfect job on most clicks & pops.
I’ve used Wave Repair for many years, but since it’s manual it usually takes me a full-weekend to fix-up a digitized LP. It wouldn’t be practical for 100 albums all at once. I recently purchased Wave Corrector and I’m currently using both programs on a particularly bad LP I’ve been working on for a few weekends (but not really the full-weekends).
\
- Some people like the sound of vinyl and that’s a matter of personal taste, but technically (noise, distortion, frequency response) it’s inferior to digital.
All that and we did publish instructions.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_copying_tapes_lps_or_minidiscs_to_cd.html
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_click_and_pop_removal_techniques.html
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/splitting_a_recording_into_separate_tracks.html
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/recording_78_rpm_records.html
Koz
Probably one of the worst things to happen in this process isn’t audio or data. After you get into this, you start to wonder if some of those albums are worth the work.
“I haven’t listened to this album since 1983. Do I really want it in the collection?”
Koz
Does the Audacity software let me reduce crackles and pops on the records?
Speaking of iTunes & iCloud, somebody told me about a trick which I have not tried.* I’ve been told that you can upload your scratchy vinyl recording to iCloud and since Apple doesn’t want to store a million copies of every song, when you download it you get back a clean digital copy from the their master iTunes library. See the [u]Apple Website[/u].
And don’t use MP3. MP3 is a compressed format that causes music distortion—and you can’t stop it. Save music in WAV which takes much more digital storage. MP3 reads good on the tin—music with small files—but isn’t “free.”
POINT ↔ COUNTERPOINT
MP3 is lossy. Data is thrown away during compression. At low bitrates (smaller files where more data is thrown away) there will be audible compression artifacts and you’ll hear the quality loss. Also, if you open an MP3 in Audacity (or any “normal” audio editor) it gets decompressed. If you re-export as MP3 you are going through another generation of lossy compression.
If you want MP3s, save any intermediate files as WAV or FLAC (and/or as an Audacity project) and compress to MP3 ONCE as the last step after editing & noise reduction, etc.
Many people save a master FLAC archive and make MP3 (or AAC) files for everyday listening (FLAC is lossless compression. The files are almost half the size of WAVs and tagging (artist/title/album information) is better-supported for FLAC than for WAV.
On the other hand, a good quality (higher bitrate) MP3 can often sound identical to the uncompressed original in a proper scientific, blind [u]ABX Listening Test[/u]. MP3 tries to throw-away information/details that you can’t hear anyway. Dolby Digital is AC3 compression which is also lossy, but I’ve got some DVD concerts with 5.1 surround that sound awesome!
\
- I haven’t tried it because I only digitize records that are not available digitally.
you get back a clean digital copy
What have they done with my dirt?!?
This will not go well with the people who went through all this to avoid “digital artifacts.”
It’s totally possible to create perfect sounding MP3 files, but it’s a time bomb. You may not be able to make playlists or do other production without creating an MP3 from the MP3. Chances are good you can hear double compression.
MP3 is an end product. Make an MP3 and Full Stop.
Koz