Audacity Forum

I cannot see if Audacity has built in DSP/Dolby for vinyl sound clean-up.
I do not see a DSP plug-in available.

How can a user clean up the input audio (at the time of RIP'ing - the best time) or after RIP audio using Audacity?

Do you know Dolby is going to help you here, or are you guessing?

All the Dolby processors I ever met come in pairs. Encode the sound at the beginning and then decode it much later at the performance. I don't know of any Dolby tools to clean up vinyl playback.

As far as other digital signal processing, the best I ever saw was plugins that would allow you to find clicks and pops and go in manually and "fix" them. It's generally considered a bad idea to let the software fix them. This kills you on noisy recordings. These tend to stay noisy because fixing them is either impossible or so difficult as to be not worth it.

If you have the only known recording of a performer long dead, then yes, devote several weeks of your life to remastering, but most people just have a pile of vinyl they want to put to CD. You'd do much better making sure you have sparkling clean records and a perfectly aligned turntable and new stylus.

Koz

I agree with Koz.

Dolby Noise Reduction is a technology to Compress / Expand audio for use with cassette tapes. It's not going to help you any. Most tape decks have the circuitry for it, so I doubt anyone has written a plugin to do the work in software.

As for the DSP plugin, you don't actually know what DSP stands for, do you? Every single plugin and effect available for Audacity does some amount of DSP.

The best thing you can do is use a nice, clean record (buy some vinyl cleaner) played using a high quality cartridge, needle, and turntable. Plug those into a high quality pre-amp. Plug that into the Line In on your high quality, properly setup soundcard. If all this is correct, the results will be good.

If the results are not good, either fix the bottle neck (not possible with damaged or otherwise poor vinyl), or learn to use Audacity's Noise Removal, Click Removal, and Repair (use 1.3.3 since early versions don't have Repair, I'm told it's quite nice).