vinyl basics

Special Interest Groups Recording Techniques
1

I’m recording from a USB turntable on MacOS 10.4. I’ve got both 1.2.5 and 1.3.3 installed…

  1. I’ve seen one suggestion in this forum to record at 44.1kHz 32-bit sampling and then export at 44.1kHz 16-bit – is that the consensus opinion?

  2. What is the recommended order to apply these effects: click removal, noise removal, normalization.

  3. What are the recommended “safe” settings for those effects? (And if those aren’t the defaults, why not?)

Thanks!

2

wax_trax

  1. yes those settings are good for Vinyl transfer to CD (I assume that is what you are doing?) - 44.1kHz 16-bit is the CD standard. If you were making music DVDs then you should use 48kHz. If you are exporting to MP3, you may want to reset the default bitrate of 128 to something a bit higher (test to see if you can hear the difference on 128/192/256).

  2. AFAIK there is no recommended order - except that normalization should always be the last thing you do - provided you decide to normalize, personnnaly I do not. I have never had much joy with the click/pop removal effect in Audacity - so I use the excellent Repair tool in 1.3.3. Identify the click, zoom in, select the affected section (up to 128 sound samples) then apply the Repair effect - Hard manual work - but gives excellent results on old treasured recordings.

  3. Sorry no proper experience - so can’t comment.

BTW I note that you have both 1.2 and 1.3 Beta - just be aware that Audacity projects created in 1.2 can be opened and worked on in 1.3 - but if a project has been moved to or created in 1.3 it can no longer ever be opened in 1.2. I tend to use 1.3.3 all the time now as it seems stable enough for my relatively modest needs of LP/tape digitisation and repair.

Also if you do plan to stay wih 1.2 - note that there is an updated stable release 1.2.6 than can be downloaded from the Audacity/Sourceforge site

Enjoy your conversion project …

WC

3

There’s a useful wiki page on this topic:
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Noise_Removal

Here’s a relevant quote “if you run Click Removal, do it before Noise Removal, not afterwards.”

Personally, I would make sure you use a nice stylus and decent turntable and pre-amp before worrying about noise removal. The Noise Removal in 1.3.3 is quite a bit nicer than the one in 1.2.6, but it’s still not perfect. Experimenting is the best thing to do.