OK, the time is finally upon me, I need to get my none too small vinyl collection into MP3.
I am making the assumption that a fair number of you are waaay ahead of me in getting this done, but just cannot get my head around getting everything ripped and encoded into indvidual mp3 tracks.

What does you use to rip/encode/split down to mp3, and how automated is the process???

Thanks

Well I suppose I'd make a wave file though the line in of my soundcard using whichever software you like. Then tidy up the hiss, pops and clicks that vinyl gives using SoundForge or similar, then encode to mp3.

Not sure how automated you can make this since its all got to be done in real time. It'll be time consuming anyway!

Indeed!!!

I would strongly recommend that you only do this for albums that are irreplaceable. If you can get the source digitally, that is far easier and less time intensive. If your source is rare vinyl, then you might want to take the following steps:

a) Make sure you are dealing with the best equipment possible. No sense having noise in your input lines or from the physical connections.
b) Clean and examine your vinyl carefully. The cleaner source sound, the less fixing you need to do by hand later on.
c) Prepare your environment. When I did my vinyl, I found that I was getting all kinds of strange noise. I later traced it to a plasma globe that was plugged in at the time and a ceiling fan that was running, blowing air onto the turntable.
d) If you only have a few albums and you have the space on your hard drive, record them into the computer at one shot. The environmental cleanup is far more annoying to deal with, so if you have it done, you might want to use all of the time possible.
e) Listen carefully to each recording with a notebook in hand. Mark off any suspected spot, snap, crackle or pop that you find. (Yes, that was intentional, thank you... )
f) Only do this listening and all editing for short bursts at a time! Your ears will get fatigued, and you will "miss stuff" if you go for too long without rest.
g) Edit the big stuff by hand. The automatic cleaning routines of SoundForge or CoolEdit can only go so far. It is better if you can get any major issues addressed before trying any bulk filters.
h) Try the built in filters, but make sure you have undo capability on. You will want to do A/B comparisons between the tracks. Go easy on the filter settings - too much will squash your recording, and distort it.
i) Patience! For really good quality copies from vinyl, you have to invest the time. But for a rare recording, it is worth it.

I completely agree with Paul. It's a pain, but it's worth it for irreplacable vinyl. A couple other notes:

- Make sure you've got some variable gain control. I'm piping my record player through a Radio Shack mixer into an Onkyo external USB sound card. I have the gain on both turned relatively far up, but that's what it takes to get the signals loud enough that you've got a good rip but just below the point where it would start clipping.

- I'm currently using Audacity for sound processing. It's automatic noise removal is great on hiss, but doesn't do squat for pops and clicks. Still, it's good enough that I don't feel a lot of need to go back and dork with the audio any further.

- I'll record one album side at a time, then clean it up, cut it up, and save the WAV files. Audacity is sufficiently unstable that it's important to save after every step.

- I'm using one of those Discwasher wet-brush things to clean albums before playing them. This seems to noticably cut down on noise.

- At some point in the future, I might want to go back and do fancier cleanup. I archive the raw WAV capture from the album side as a FLAC file. Only then do I do all the post-processing and MP3 conversion. I discard the intermediate WAV files. (This is analogous to saving the "raw" images you get out of better digital cameras as if they're your precious negatives.)

- Finally, make sure that you're digitizing at whatever the "native" rate is for your sound card. My Onkyo is 44.1KHz, native, but most Soundblasters are 48KHz. You don't want some software resampling to unnecessarily mess with your music.

- Finally, make sure that you're digitizing at whatever the "native" rate is for your sound card. My Onkyo is 44.1KHz, native, but most Soundblasters are 48KHz. You don't want some software resampling to unnecessarily mess with your music.

How do i find out the native rate of my sound card?

cheers, Thomas

Thanks Guys!
Most of the vinyl I have is stuff that I have not been able to find on CD, but at least I have gotten it down to a stack about two feet thick
The rest of it I have kept just for the covers. Like the early Vertigo label stuff the has the crazy pattern on the label and also on the inner sleeve. Or Motorhead Overkill on green vinyl.
Cds can be so boring sometimes, the packaging never seems to be so nuts as it used to be.

Two foot thick?!?!?!?! At about 1/8th of an inch per album, you are talking over 112 albums to rip! I do not envy you that task...

I agree that CD art just is not the same. Such limited space on the insert and the disk itself. Still, you can have some interesting multimedia content, if you try...

How do i find out the native rate of my sound card?

I dunno, maybe read the specs. If you want to burn to a CD, you're stuck resampling, but if your goal is to make MP3s, you can keep things in whatever format your card prefers. lame will (as far as I can tell) happily digest a 48KHz signal.

Yeah, hence the automation request for tracks etc.
I suppose I will get through some of them only to decide I don't like them anymore!!

"g) Edit the big stuff by hand."

Any tips or links to tips on this step? I've attempted to clean some vinyl recordings this way and other than attempting to reform the curve at a pop, I'm not sure what to do. It usually ends up sounding more odd than the pop...

I used GramoFile (I don't know about anything other than the Linux version) to find track split points (and you can edit them), but IIRC it also has a pop filter. I'm not sure how (well) it works.

Burn the MP3s to some of the Verbatim Digital Vinyl discs

Greetings!

If the channels sound very similar, I would splice the data from one channel to the other. If both are bad, and the glitch is small enough, I just discard the samples.

I believe the best audio restoration is by Cedar Audio You gotta believe them if they have a range of products exclusivly for forensics!
But I doubt would want to pay that much. If you're really keen. put them on a new HD and take it to a studio to process. You'd be amazed at the difference it will make. You'll pay there too, but if they're rare, it'll be worth it

Check out Audiotools here, I 'm halfway through a couple of thousand Lp's and cassettes and I think that this program is the goods - and a heck of a nice, helpful guy too.

I would strongly recommend that you only do this for albums that are irreplaceable. If you can get the source digitally, that is far easier and less time intensive.

Would it be considered illegal to download mp3's songs from the internet that are on a vinyl LP you own? I wouldn't think so since you could create them yourself from your LP if you wanted to, but it might be a grey area.

Actually, for a sizeable chunk of my vinyl that is a valid option.
Usenet to the max

I think ethically it would not be appropriate to download digital copies of music that you own in a different medium. In the same way that buying a VHS tape does not intitle me to DVD quality copies of a movie. I suppose you could argue that if you downloaded it a poor bitrate it would closer resemble your own copy.

I think ethically it would not be appropriate to download digital copies of music that you own in a different medium.

As I recall, MP3.com lost a lawsuit to RIAA on just this issue. The plan was that MP3.com would validate your ownership by having you insert the cd in your computer. After that, you could stream "your music" off their servers, listening to it from any internet connected computer.
-jk

I am slightly concerned about the ethics of this, but given RIAAs latest marketing tactic of suing its customers I am getting less and less concerned.

For most of the stuff I have on vinyl though, even the usenet DLs are ripped from vinyl because at a best case - the CD is out of print, or worst case - never produced.