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Converting Audio from Vinyl to MP3?

Posted by Cliff on from the those-large-groovy-disks-that-came-before-cds dept.

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?

1 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. It can be done! by Enry · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...)