Lotsa noise, unpredictable spot, USB turntable

[kozikowski]

<<<Would seem to suggest Ion functioning fine.>>>

Actually, it suggest to me that the ION is producing a damaged, off-standard audio bitstream and it's taking that long for the turntable and the Mac to get far enough out of step to fail. Everybody has those failures and the failure duration is always very close to the same number, but everybody has a different number. "My capture goes fine for 11 minutes and then turns to garbage." The only difference between all the different forum postings is the number of minutes--but they all fail the same way. Yours is 5-1/2 minutes. Let me add that to the list.

Since the Mac is a respected, high-end, quality computer and the turntable was designed to be thrown away after the last vinyl, which one would you think is more likely to be wrong?

<<<I wrote the other day about how the noise is all limited to higher frequencies. Is there a way in Audacity to modulate only certain portions of the frequency range.>>>

You can try selecting a small portion of the damaged work and apply Effect > Equalization. The blue line is a rubber band. Click and drag to affect different pitches of music. Don't bet the farm, however. Digital trash tends to be white noise which affects everything even though it doesn't sound like that to your ear. Start by dragging everything to the right of about 8000 all the way down to -30 and leave everything to the left alone. See what that sounds like. Change to 7000, etc, etc. While you have the tool open, drag the lower right corner to make the panel really big. It's easier to mess with that way.

Koz

[zenben]

Fair enough. I'll give it a shot next weekend. Just got the Ion. Real disappointment as I have about 500 albums to convert and I'm not a computer genius, just an old engineer trying to reason and bailing wire my way through this thing.

[raycnwista]

I have been using an ART USB Phono for ages on an antique Mac G4 500mhz processor with never a hiccup. I just got a new imac intel machine and my frustrations led me to seek out this discussion group that I never knew existed. My suggestion: Pretend you never read this and go find an antique G4 Mac for a few pennies and relax and record your lp's, howevr, if you figure out a solution reply to me because I am ready to jump....

[raycnwista]

I can appreciate Audacity and it's philosophy of free software. It worked great on previous versions on my older cpu's. How long do we expect this collaboration to keep jumping to the os changes that occur? If anyone has found a simple suitable replacement to convert lp's to mp3's tell us so we can get on with life's changes

[kozikowski]

<<<If anyone has found a simple suitable replacement to convert lp's to mp3's tell us so we can get on with life's changes>>>

An audio cable and two small barrels. Can't get much simpler.

http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic ... 8840#p8840

Koz

[timbinaz]

I too have run into problems with static after several minutes of recording. I'm using the ION TTUSB05 with a 6-month old Macbook Pro running Leopard and Audacity 1.2.6. Today, the problem went away when I quit the program, moved the ION USB cable to the other USB port (left side), and restarted Audacity. I recorded about an hour of audio without problems.

[kozikowski]

<<<I recorded about an hour of audio without problems.>>>

Then you win. For now.

The problem with USB services is not that they're broken, it's that they're unstable. I wish they were broken.

"I'm using a [xxx] USB turntable on my computer and [yyy] minutes into the performance, the audio gets noisy/crunchy/fails. I found that I can change [zzz] and the problem goes away."

That, in abbreviated formula form, appears billions of times on all the forums.

In your case xxx is an ION turntable, yyy is several minutes, and zzz is USB Connection.

If you go over the complaints, you will find all sorts of variations in xxx, yyy, and zzz. but the complaint remains the same: I can't transfer my vinyl. yyy variations seem to range from several seconds to 40 minutes. Unfortunately, one of the values of zzz is zero. The system will never work right no matter what you do and you need to either use the analog method or get your money back.

Koz

[timbinaz]

Koz,

You're right about the instability with the ION USB output -- and it's not just with Audacity on the Mac. This morning I had problems on the Mac with static. So I plugged the USB into a PC and tried the EZ Vinyl Converter software. That worked great, for a while. Came back to it later in the day and couldn't get audio in or out. Plugged the USB back into the Mac and couldn't get audio in or out. I figured the USB output had died. So I started composing an email to ION and stopped to rerun Audacity to copy down the error message it displayed on the last try. Big surprise. It started working again. Guess I'll start using the analog output as recommended.

I wonder if ION designed the turntable with the capability to update software through the USB?

[waxcylinder]

I must restate the case on behalf of ION/Numark

I ran an ION TTUSB with no instability problems on either 1.2.x or 1.3 x (once I'd defragged my hard drive - and stopped all unnecessary background processing).

The only fault that I found with the ION - and the one that eventually led me to ditching it and dragging my old Technics TT and amp out of the attic) - was that on some LPs/singles (but not all) I got annoyingly noticeable wow&flutter. This I think must be down to the extremely low mass of the plastic ION platter. The platter alone on my Technics weighs more that the entire ION, including it's packaging.

So I'm afraid to say the instability is far more likely to be your computing environment - with the most likely culprit being the USB connector sockets - though IIRC some ION users have experienced bad USB connections on the ION. But as Koz frequently reminds people, you do have the option with the ION of using its analogue output (the RCA plugs) and feeding this to your soundcard - you will still of course be susceptible to potential wow& flutter though.

WC

WC

[kozikowski]

<<<I ran an ION TTUSB with no instability problems on either 1.2.x or 1.3 x (once I'd defragged my hard drive - and stopped all unnecessary background processing).>>>

Remember which forum you're posting on. What is this "defragging" thing of which you speak? All my applications are closed. It says so on the Menu Bar.

If these turntables were made by Apple, they would so totally be connected with FireWire instead of USB. On the video forums USB hard drives are widely considered to be completely inappropriate because of oddball flow management and speed control problems. Sound familiar?

So what you're saying is USB turntables are only appropriate to the Linux people who are heavy techies and can write their own hardware driver software if they run into trouble, and the PC people who know how to take their computers apart at a moment's notice. They're completely useless on Macs.

My mouth keeps forming the words, "Incompletely Tested Beta Level Product."

Koz