Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

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BenTrabetere
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Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by BenTrabetere »

A friend gave me a perfectly good turntable, and so my next Covid Project will be to convert my vinyl collection to digital. I plan to use Audacity, and based on the tutorials I have found it looks to be a straight forward process. I have over 150 LPs that are worth converting, and I am interested in any advice to make the process easier. Anything to avoid “if I knew then what I know now” mistakes and regrets.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by freshminted »

1. How are you getting from (presumably) magnetic cartridge level signal output to line in level for your A2D (or even the line in on your computer)? Do you need a pickup preamp?

2. Are you happy with automatic scratch/click/pop/hiss removal? Repairing clicks and pops by hand gets old very quickly. So does breaking recordings up into individual tracks and all the tagging. Also you may have to filter out turntable rumble.

3. Are your vinyl records already available as other media? If so, then don't bother with vinyl.

I only digitise records if there is no other way. Life's too short...
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by RollyShed »

freshminted wrote: Tue May 11, 2021 11:48 pm 3. Are your vinyl records already available as other media? If so, then don't bother with vinyl.

I only digitise records if there is no other way. Life's too short...
If the "record" is on Youtube it will be quicker and simpler to download from there and save it.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by AndyMH »

I have in the past done this and did use audacity, but as said, life is too short. In the end, over a period of time, just went out and bought CDs and ripped them.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by GS3 »

BenTrabetere wrote: Tue May 11, 2021 10:58 pm Anything to avoid “if I knew then what I know now” mistakes and regrets.
Measure the time it takes you to do one, multiply by the total number of LP's and think "do I really want to do this"?

In my case the answer was "not really".

I still have a few LP's that cannot be found and which I would like to rip. Maybe some day I will get a round tuit. Maybe not. Chances are probably not. A shame really.

This is the type of project you need to enjoy the process of doing it more than the end result. Years ago, when the Internet was brand new, I spent quite a few hours transcribing some old books, believing I was doing some significant service to mankind. Later I saw Google digitising books by the millions and realised I had wasted my time.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by BenTrabetere »

Thanks to everyone who has responded....

I realize this will be a very long, very tedious project, and I suspect it may be one I abandon. Or it could be a "rainy day" project like my 'Scan the Family Photo Albums' project that is now almost complete. And I did spend 30+ hours scanning and restoring a torn, taped, and discolored plat map from 1904 - all 20x30-in of it.

I had not seriously considered downloading full albums from Youtube, and I am surprised at how many are available from my collection. Amazed that Split by The Groundhogs is on Youtube. This will save me a lot of time and trouble.

I have a lot of old, obscure recordings, and I would be very surprised if they were even available on CD. And if they were, purchasing them would be economically impractical. I am sure many will not be 'tubed.

Again, thanks for the suggestions and advice.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by Portreve »

BenTrabetere wrote: Wed May 12, 2021 12:42 pm I realize this will be a very long, very tedious project, and I suspect it may be one I abandon. Or it could be a "rainy day" project like my 'Scan the Family Photo Albums' project that is now almost complete. And I did spend 30+ hours scanning and restoring a torn, taped, and discolored plat map from 1904 - all 20x30-in of it.
I'll just throw in my 2¢ for whatever it may be worth.

The most critical things you can do for an audio digitizing project can be summed up in two words: preparation and research. By preparation, what I mean is making sure your source materials — all your vinyl — is as clean and free of dust as possible. Make sure you're using an amp with an actual phonograph input (assuming you're using a regular turntable) because what comes out of a real turntable is, as alluded to above, not the otherwise standard 1 volt that you'd get from a cassette player or a CD player or a laserdisc player, etc. And make sure you do a dry run through to make sure you've got your levels set correctly, both in terms of hardware and in terms of the program you're using to digitize.

Also, do your research to find out optimal settings, plugins, etc., to handle any otherwise unresolved audio fidelity issues.

Let's assume you've got your material digitized, and it's processed and now "ready to go". This means you've digitized both sides of a given album, done the post-digitizing processing work, and you've copy-n-pasted each song into its own file. Use Audacity then to export as FLAC. This is a non-lossy format which is ideal for archiving purposes, as well as for playback where perfect fidelity is critical.

Here's what I do (I'm working from CDs, but at this stage in the project, there would be no difference) in my own workflow.

Find a good copy of the album art. You may be in luck doing a Google image search. Ideally, you want a 500×500 px image. It's always acceptable to go with a larger (even substantially larger) original of the image fidelity is better. But, you will nevertheless want to scale the image down to 500×500 because there are limits on how large your imbedded album art can be.

Get all your other desired metadata together. This ideally will be the year of release, name of the band, and track names.

Now, go back to your materials. Open all the tracks in EasyTag and number them, name them, and add in all the metadata. There's a tabbed interface, and the second tab is for album artwork. Add in your artwork. Save the changes. Archive your work.

I'm not in a position to do this at the moment since I'm typing this message in my phone, but I'll be happy to post a couple screenshots from EasyTag and make it super-simple to navigate the program.

Anyhow, when you're done, grab the FLAC files for your album and open them with Sound Converter. Change the settings to whatever audio format you want (for example, MP3, OGG, etc. Then, hit start and boom! you'll get transcoded copies you can Chuck onto a flash drive and play on your TV, your car stereo, etc.

Incidentally, you (and others here) ma be interested to learn that the Audacity project was recently acquired by Muse Group. They've committed to keeping it fully open source, but enhancing it beyond where it is now. Not that that new version is going to come out "next Tuesday" by any means, but it will be interesting to see what they're able to do with it.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by ajgreeny »

Interestingly, I have recently digitised six vinyl albums but did it an easier way.

Many years ago I replaced a NAD cassette recorder with a Philips CD Audio Recorder/Player meaning I completely got rid of the annoying hiss of cassette recordings even when using Dolby-C.

I still have a fully working Dual turntable, NAD amplifier with phono input for turntable and some still excellent and crackle-free vinyl disks which I record onto the Audio-CD-RW that I have used many times in the past for this purpose.
I don't bother about separate tracks at this point but record each side of a disk as a single track, rip that to flac and mp3 with abcde, then with careful choice of minimum db level and length of silence time I can split that full side recording into tracks automatically using mp3splt.
Finally I rename files manually and tag using easytag. I suspect there are ways to rename automatically as well but with so few to deal with I haven't bothered to search very hard.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by GS3 »

This is the type of project that can be rewarding if you enjoy doing it but can be tedious if you just want to have it done. There is no better time to do something than when you feel like doing it and there is no worse time to do it than when you really do not feel like doing it.

I have a set of Reader's Digest Mexican music albums which I want to digitize for the only reason that I listened to them as a teenager and some songs are set in my mind. I cannot find those songs now sung by anybody. I have had this project on my list for about twenty years now. Maybe I should get off my backside and get started. Maybe this thread will be the trigger to get me started. I still have the old Lenco turntable and everything I need ... except the will to do it.

When I was a teenager I visited an old country house that belonged to my grandfather and there was one of those ancient 78 RPM record players that was purely mechanical, no electronics. There were steel needles which you changed when they wore out. I enjoyed playing a few records and I kept with me one which I just loved and I could still play it on my modern turntable. It was a 1927 recording by Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians. Side A was "I've never seen a straight banana" and side B was "I wonder how I look when I'm asleep". I kept it and played it for a few years until a friend of mine sat on it and broke it in half. I was heartbroken. I had never thought of transferring it to tape and now it was gone. Forever. I was sure I would never be able to listen to these songs again.

But decades later the miracle of the Internet happened and I got it back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX_YkbcyMFQ

Now there are several covers of both songs in Youtube.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by cliffcoggin »

BenTrabetere wrote: Wed May 12, 2021 12:42 pm Amazed that Split by The Groundhogs is on Youtube.

That's showing your age Ben. I too bought that LP when it came out, and still have it, along with a first edition of Led Zeppelin which is supposedly worth a lot of money, and many others I have not played for years (decades actually.)
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by sarge816 »

GS3 wrote: Wed May 12, 2021 3:44 pm When I was a teenager I visited an old country house that belonged to my grandfather and there was one of those ancient 78 RPM record players that was purely mechanical, no electronics. There were steel needles which you changed when they wore out. I enjoyed playing a few records and I kept with me one which I just loved and I could still play it on my modern turntable. It was a 1927 recording by Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians. Side A was "I've never seen a straight banana" and side B was "I wonder how I look when I'm asleep". I kept it and played it for a few years until a friend of mine sat on it and broke it in half. I was heartbroken. I had never thought of transferring it to tape and now it was gone. Forever. I was sure I would never be able to listen to these songs again.

But decades later the miracle of the Internet happened and I got it back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX_YkbcyMFQ
Amazing story, enjoyed listening to your old record on Youtube. Thanks for sharing.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by HaveaMint »

The only advice I may offer is when you get the recording of the vinyl to your liking keep the original unedited version separate from any edits. Save the edits to a different location. It is hours / days/ months of work and was fun. We had a couple of Radio Stations in the 70's and I saved some promo records and others. Cleaning them was vital before recording. Must be very very clean. The lesser the editing the better.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by lsemmens »

As everyone else has indicated, if it's already available on line, why waste your time?

edit: Of course if you can't find it, Audacity can do an acceptable job.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by GS3 »

sarge816 wrote: Wed May 12, 2021 7:45 pmAmazing story, enjoyed listening to your old record on Youtube. Thanks for sharing.
Glad you liked it.

To the OP: if you only have the turntable and you need a preamp you can find them on eBay or Aliexpress for just a few dollars. Probably Amazon too.

Regarding old LP's, I have you all beat because I have quite a few from the 1960's including
Several Beatles
A couple by Credence Clearwater Revival
Johnny Cash at St. Quentin
The Graduate - Simon & Garfunkel
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida - Iron Butterfly
Tapestry - Carole King

Yes, I am that old.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by RollyShed »

GS3 wrote: Thu May 13, 2021 5:00 am Regarding old LP's, I have you all beat because I have quite a few from the 1960's including
Several Beatles
A couple by Credence Clearwater Revival
Johnny Cash at St. Quentin
The Graduate - Simon & Garfunkel
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida - Iron Butterfly
Tapestry - Carole King

Yes, I am that old.
So? Here are a few of the ones I have. Dates are my purchase date -

An Evening With Harry Belafonte - 1964
Scotch & Irish Folksongs, Robin Hall & Jimmie MacGregor - 1965
Kingston Trio (a few of those) - 1963-4
Lonnie Donegan Rides Again - 1963
The Lion Sleeps tonight, The Tokens - 1963
Laddie Lie Near Me, Jean Redpath - 1963?
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by AndyMH »

Code: Select all

Regarding old LP's, I have you all beat because I have quite a few from the 1960's including
Match and raise you :D
Beatles - nearly all of them (used to have all their singles as well, lost in a house move).
Graduate - yes, plus sounds of silence, bookends.
Tapestry - yes.
Others - Crosby, Stills & Nash, Fairport Convention, could go on...
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by GS3 »

It's the Old Geezer's Convention! :)

The thing is that any old recordings that others would recognize are surely available for download. It would have to be a very obscure recording for it not to be available digitally. I am even surprised the Reader's Digest collections are not available. I often think of digitising things, documents, books, music, more for posterity than for myself but then I have no idea where to put it. I wish there was some general repository where I could put such things because it does no good to digitise an LP if it will disappear with my computers when I pass away... which, as we have already established, could be any day now.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by JerryF »

BenTrabetere wrote: Tue May 11, 2021 10:58 pm A friend gave me a perfectly good turntable, and so my next Covid Project will be to convert my vinyl collection to digital. I plan to use Audacity, and based on the tutorials I have found it looks to be a straight forward process. I have over 150 LPs that are worth converting, and I am interested in any advice to make the process easier. Anything to avoid “if I knew then what I know now” mistakes and regrets.
Hi Ben,

Years ago I did the same thing with about 10 albums. Because I didn't have a way to directly connect my turntable to the computer, I did it the difficult way by recording the albums to cassette then recording them using a Windows program (I hadn't started using Linux yet). I then cleaned them with clicking/popping filters. Then separated the tracks and manually created the metadata for the albums and songs.

My advice: convert only the ones that you can't get digitally. 150 LPs are a lot, even if you have some automation.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by mediclaser »

A friend of mine who is older than my dad did something similar back in early 2000's. Yeah, I have to emphasize he's old, because many people stereotype them as technologically challenged. ;)

Anyways, he converted all his vinyl record collection to MP3. I can't remember the software he used, but I know it wasn't free (Windows). It gave me an idea to find a similar software to convert a cassette tape recording of my daughter when she was one year old. That's how I found audacity (Windows).

Recently, I have been using audacity to convert audio CDs to MP3.
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Re: Vinyl-to-Digital - Advice wanted

Post by RollyShed »

I went to our record collection, picked up an old looking 45, Rod Mackinnon, Universal Soldier, Walking down the Line.

The computer - I typed in "youtube the universal soldier rod mackinnon". And there it is.

If I wanted it, Download the YouTube of it, drag the saved file into MMC and hit convert. An MP3 or what ever format I want and saved. Actually the next up on Youtube was Kate Rusby, The Lark so I saved that one instead.
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