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Converting Audio from Vinyl to MP3?
superpat asks: "My father-in-law recently disposed of his turntable, and I foolishly volunteered to rip his vinyl from my turntable to CDs. The process seems to be: rip to WAV -> process to remove surface noise, find track boundaries, encode as MP3 -> burn CD. Presumably I can use sound recorder to rip from the line in port to a WAV (I'm on Windows ME, unfortunately), and I have RealJukebox with Roxio CD Creator to do the last step. Now there seems an amazing variety of software available to do the middle stage, from comprehensive general purpose sound processing packages such as Soundforge to special purpose apps such as LP Ripper. Has anybody has any success with this process? Any recommendations?" Has anyone had luck with a specific program or set of programs that might make this process any easier, regardless of OS?
Yup. There's a company called Proteron that sells a great suite of MP3 and MP2 (and vorbis!) codecs that work to convert of records. Just have to pipe your audio feed into the audio-in port on your Mac and start encoding. Its really that easy. Check out this link to N2MP3 Pro.
My problem was that I grew up listening to Firestone Christmas albums from the '60s (I listened to them in my youth in the 70s and 80s). Anyway, they're in short supply, and have not been transferred to CD. But I wanted my siblings and parents to have copies on CD. Unfortunately, I have not found a nice Linux solution yet, but here goes:
Buy a copy of CoolEdit 2000 and the Audio Cleanup tool. This will run you a total of about $90, but well worth it. CE2000 is $60, with the cleanup tool being about $30. You can demo both CE2000 and the cleanup tool to see how they work for you. The visualization is pretty nice too, as you can quickly see the big pops or clicks in the audio.
Use something other than your laptop to record the audio from the turntable (be sure it goes through an RIAA amp on the way). Most laptops have only mono input. I used my Nomad Jukebox to record to WAV format. Be sure you crank the gain up a bit.
I recorded a full album side per WAV, making really large files. Drop said files into CoolEdit 2000, then use the audio cleanup tool to filter out the clicks and pops. This takes about 15 minutes per WAV file. Other pops/clicks can be handled if you find them, but CE2000's algorithm is pretty good.
Once you have that, normalize the volume, then split each song into separate WAV files.
You now have raw WAV files you can either burn directly to CD, or convert to MP3. Don't convert to MP3, then burn, as you lose some of the quality (yeah yeah, they were crappy vinyl first...)
You plug the turntable to your PC's line-in, start gramofile, which will begin recording when it hears sound and create a big wav per side. It then finds the silence spots to break into tracks, has a large number of filters for noice reduction, volume normalization and others, and you can run the resulting wavs through oggenc or whatever encoder you want. It's pretty cool, free as in willy, works on linux, what else do you want, a GUI?
Well, when I used it, it had no Gui (had a text-mode interactive interface, bit ugly, but more than sufficient). Recommended.
But you have to realize that a clean, well-mastered (or even better direct to disk ala Sheffield Labs) LP has musical fidelity that no CD will ever match.
That's an opinion, but I have yet to see convincing experimental evidence to support it (however, I've never really done a literature search or anything). A competing hypothesis is that an LP merely distorts the original signal in a way that "sounds good".
This debate can be reduced to a simple test: Can an audiophile distinguish between an LP, and a CD recording of that same LP, at a statistically-significant accuracy in a double-blind test?
In other words, take an LP player producing a line-level audio output, connected to an amplifier. That's "A". For "B", the line-out from the LP player is sampled and recorded to a CD, then that CD is played into the amplifier. For each experimental trial, either "A" or "B" is selected at random, and the tester is asked to identify which one is active. Not which one sounds better, just which is which.
On cheap equipment like a $5 PeeCee sound card, I'm sure it'd be easy to hear the difference (e.g. your recording would include electrical noise from the hard drive motors, etc). However, with proper equipment (and of course a green pen to color the edge of the CD), I'm not convinced that there would be any audible loss of fidelity.
Does anyone have any references to actual experimental results for this sort of test?