Audacity Forum

hello
i have a few albums that are obscure and have not been commercially digitized.
i have done some research and see the behringer UFO202 seems to be the device of choice for this as it has a pre-amp integrated and grounding for the turntable.
my preference would be the behringer UCA202 as its well recommended and well rated by so many, and as i have way more cassette tapes to transfer than vinyl.

so my questions
can the behringer UFO20 be used to do everything the behringer UCA202 can do or is that one device specific to vinyl?

is there some way to input the turntable direct to the desktop via line in like a tape deck?
or perhaps if the turntable is hooked to a stereo receiver to than input the receiver/turntable via the "AUX" output to the line in on the PC?

transferring vinyl is not my primary area if interest so i would rather not invest in any additional vinyl specific equipment unless necessary

thanks

or perhaps if the turntable is hooked to a stereo receiver to than input the receiver/turntable via the "AUX" output to the line in on the PC?

Yes, that will work as long as you have a desktop/tower computer with a regular soundcard and line-in. (Most laptops have only mic-in and headphone-out). Or, you can connect AUX or TAPE-OUT (to a UAC202).

can the behringer UFO20 be used to do everything the behringer UCA202 can do or is that one device specific to vinyl?

The UCA202 has a direct/USB monitor switch instead of a line-phono switch and it has an S/PDIF optical digital output.

Neither of those Behringer interfaces has a recording level control. That's not a problem if the level is a little low but if the level is too hot you can clip (distort) the analog-to-digital converter.

i only wish to record the 3 or 4 albums i cant find digitally.

The UCA202 has a direct/USB monitor switch instead of a line-phono switch and it has an S/PDIF optical digital output.

so the UFO202 would only be good for the vinyl specific then?

aud409 wrote: ↑

Tue Apr 21, 2020 10:10 pm

so the UFO202 would only be good for the vinyl specific then?

It could also be used for recording from a cassette player, a CD player, a mixing desk...
It cannot be used (directly) for recording a microphone - you would need a microphone pre-amp, or a USB device that has a microphone pre-amp built in.

Audacity is OK but one of the best out there is something called VinylStudio. I think it’s about 50 bucks.

For recording quality your choice of software doesn't matter (assuming no unusual problems). It only "captures" the digital audio stream and sends it to the hard drive as a file.

although it is capable of doing so and with or without the RIAA equalization.

That would only be necessary if you don't have a phono preamp. And if you were to use a microphone preamp the load impedance would be wrong, causing worse problems.

The big advantage is that the program will do an Internet lookup for the track times, names and cover art.

That could be handy but there are programs like MP3Tag that can do it for free. (I often end-up dong some manual tag editing anyway, and there's plenty of time while recording the next album.)

It can also apply hiss, rumble and crackle filters as well as eq.

That's where you WILL find a difference. Audacity has a good noise reduction filter (good for hiss and possibly for rumble too), a high-pass filter (for rumble), and Click Removal (automatic) & Repair (manual) effects for the clicks & pops, or in some cases you can zoom-in and "re-draw" the waveform and sometimes you can get-away with simply chopping-out or muting the few-milliseconds that contain the defect..

There is a FREE special-purpose program for automatically cleaning-up vinyl clicks & pops called Wave Corrector.

I've also used Wave Repair ($30 USD) for a long time. Wave Repair can do an audibly perfect job of removing most (but not all) clicks & pops, and since you have to manually select each defect it only "touches" the audio where you identify a defect. But it's VERY time consuming. There are other non-free programs, but with only 4 records you probably want to stick with free.