Vinyl Cleanup Best Practice

Bill’s workflow is almost exactly the same as mine - except I mostly don’t bother with the “Noise Removal” steps (I did use Brian Davies’ Noise Removal tools on a couple of my LPs which were old blues albums obviously recorded from 78s and at a time prior to the availability of digital processing).

Unlike Bill, I tend to record both sides of an LP together and then do the processing - but I do Understand Bill’s rationale for working with smaller chunks and later stitching the two sides together.

I totally endorse the use of Brians Davies’ ClickRepair tool - as Bill says, it works like magic - one of the best $40 worth I ever spent. See this thread: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/click-pop-removal-clickrepair-software/1933/1

I would also add that you should clean the vinyl thoroughly before playing it - this removing the need for some processing. Do not be tempted to play the record “wet” - IMHO this can damage both the vinyl and potentially your stylus.

Do clean the stylus thoroughly _(don’t use an alcohol based solvent as I did - it unglued the diamond tip from the cantilever - oops :blush: )_and make sure it and the arm are set up and aligned correctly (I treated my deck to a new cartridge prior to doing my vinyl conversion project). Ensure that the TT is grounded correctly so that you don’t get mains-hum.

You may wish to see if your soundcard has DC-offset (a reasonably common fault). This will cause the audio to not be centred on the zero line - you can see this more easily if you zoom in a lot on the recorded wave-form. If you do have DC-offset then use Audacity to remove this as the first step immediately after capture, before you do any other processing. To remove the DC-offset use the Effect > Normalize but do NOT apply any normalization, just check the box for DC-offset removal.

Opinions vary on this but I would (and do) record and process with Audacity set to 32-bit float 44.1kHz and then use Audacity to downsample to 16-bit WAV (CD standard) on Export. Working in 32-bit will give you good headroom for the processing you are going to do (and note that ClickRepair can work with 32-bit, as well as 16-bit audio). Other posters prefer to work at 48kHz (DVD standard).

If you are feeling cautious, you may want to Export the raw capture file as a WAV (or FLAC) and back it up as a safety copy that you can go back to if you screw up the editing. You can always delete this safety copy later when you have exported, and backed up, your final production FLACs.

WC

BTW I am moving this thread to the Audio Processing section of the forum.