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.
