Apologies if this has been covered - I did search but cold not find anything.
I’m using Audacity (2.0.2) to convert vinyl LPs to digital, using a phono-to-USB gadget. It’s working great, and I’m quite blown away that software this capable is available free. Thanks to all the developers who put in the work.
However there is one minor issue I have seen a few times…
When recording, the red cursor will stop scrolling, and the waveform will also stop scrolling. The recording process is still going on - the scroll bar at the bottom changes slightly as the waveform continues to grow. When complete, there is no problem scrolling manually back and forth in the track, all the way to the end. So the recording process is working fine, it’s just the display. I don’t believe it always happens at the same time interval, but I haven’t actually noted that. It seems to happen when I have a few previously-recorded tracks on the screen, which are muted and often shrunk down to the small size. Apart from that, I can’t see any pattern to when they happen - it’s fairly unusual. It’s not stopping me from doing anything, but it should work, so I thought I would raise it here.
And one other equally-minor thing - for this exercise it would be really nice to have one button that effectively clicks Stop and then Start Recording, as one action. Some LPs have quite short gaps between tracks, and sometimes I miss getting the next track started in time. Is this possible in some way? I’m quite new to Audacity, so sorry if this is a dumb question.
There is a process for recording vinyl and it doesn’t involve stopping and starting a million times. You start the recording and go for a cup of tea. One whole side. Stop. Then mark up each song in post production with Labels. This is also the step where you apply click reduction and any filtering you might want.
File > Export Multiple and each labeled song is exported as a separate sound file suitable for dropping into the CD burning program of your choice. Or your Personal Music Player or whatever.
You can catch side two by just leaving everything recording and flip the record over. Remember, you 're going to cut it up later so you can edit out the gap.
We wrote up a whole thing about how to do this:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tutorial_copying_tapes_lps_or_minidiscs_to_cd.html
The display update is not very high on the priorities. If the machine runs out of moxie enough to constantly redraw the screen, it will just stop trying. Have you restarted the machine? Audacity works best when it’s the only thing running. No other programs or digital leftovers from other programs.
Koz
Thanks for that. I wasn’t aware of the Labels method for splitting up the audio from a whole LP side - will definitely give that a go. It’s clear that I should be using the Normalize action too - haven’t been doing that. As for the display not scrolling, I don’t have to restart the machine, I think the problem goes away if I just quit Audacity and restart it - or maybe I didn’t even do that, but just closed all the open track windows and carried on with the next one, and it was OK.
The machine is a Dell Studio 1745 laptop, with Intel Core Duo processor at 2.5GHz, and 4 Gb of RAM. It’s running Win7 Home Premium, 64 bit. Plenty of horsepower I would have thought, and normally nothing else running. Anyway, the important thing is that the recording does actually complete, so the scrolling is not a big deal.
Thanks again for the reply - a few steps up the learning curve.
Does it make any difference if you make the window smaller (or is it already small)?
What project rate are you recording at (bottom left). Rates above 44100 Hz put a lot more load on the computer with increasingly marginal improvements in quality.
Pressing and releasing Pause (blue) does that, but it restarts recording on the same track.
Gale
I haven’t tried making the current (recording) window smaller.
I’m recording at 44100
The Labels method referred to above will overcome the track-break issue.
Thanks for the help.