Can I record a vinyl album with several tracks at one time and have it broken into tracks on the CD I burn? I have been recording one track, saving it, recording the next track, saving it, etc. and then putting them together in a file to burn to a CD. This is time consuming. Is it possible to record the whole record but have it show up as separate tracks on the CD I burn?
Thanks for your help.
When the resulting files are played in order, the exact placement of the splits between tracks doesn’t matter. (Particularly if you are seeking to recreate the experience of playing the album, including the sound of the needle in between tracks.) However, the splits do become an issue when you introduce random/shuffle play or if you add single LP tracks into multi-title playlists. In those cases there will be an audible hiccup at the start of each track when the “silence” between tracks doesn’t match.
The solution is to ensure you have at least some absolute silence at the beginning and end of each track. My preference is for a fraction of second of silence before the audio for a track starts and at least a 1-second fade out after the audio for a track ends. I call this “isolating” the tracks.
What you lose in fidelity to the original is more than offset by the pleasure of being able to freely mix tracks from LP, CD and download in your media player.
An alternative approach when making CDs is to crop the silence around tracks quite short and fade that “silence” (background noise) to total silence (use the fade-in / fade-out effects). A standard audio CD will add 2 seconds of silence between tracks (Red Book / CD standard). The CD player should handle these silences to give a fairly constant amount of silence, even on shuffle play, (though the pause may be longer than 2 seconds if the player needs to search for the start of the next track).