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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?
Only question is why would you encode to mp3s before burning first. That will only decrease the sound quality. Burn straight from the wav files. Then encode to mp3 if you want to keep copies on your computer (and don't have the space to leave huge wav files)
Well, if you're going to be burning to a CD anyway (audio CD I assume... you didn't say though) then leave out the WAV->MP3 step and just burn the WAVs onto CD to keep the quality up. About ripping from vinyl to WAV, though, I have no idea :)
Not tried it myself but there was an article on this on O'Rielly network:/ 05 /record_cd.html
http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2001/01
Which reccomended Gramofile:
http://panic.et.tudelft.nl/~costar/gramofile/
Don't be put off by the Linux-centric title - gramofile works on DOS/Windows too. Looks to be more fully featured than LPRipper and costs a whole heap less (ie nothing) than SoundForge _plus the noise reduction plugin_ ($290 on top of the cost of soundforge).
At that price it's got to be worth a go!
If you must sample the LPs, do *not* use Sound Recorder. It does not have the necessary granularity to record accurate sound, and you *will* end up with terrible skips and pops. Use a specialized audio editing program like SoundForge or CoolEdit. Trust me on this one.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Try dBpowerAMP. It accepts line input and can buffer a high-quality wav to disk. Since you are coming over from an LP, 128kbps is probably the max recording you need for an mp3. Also, try ogg vorbis files, which dB writes as well.
Lowmag.net
...for several reasons already pointed out by other posters. If you absolutely insist, however, on ripping from the vinyl you have, then you should probably eliminate the step about proccessing out all the surface noise after ripping. Process it out *first* by cleaning the records. Record cleaners aren't terribly expensive (as little as $99 for decent cleaner, last time I looked) and they make a huge difference in sound quality. (Of course, that statement doesn't apply to those stupid felt-like pads/brushes that you wipe across the surface of the record. They only move the dust and pet dander around. Get a proper vacuum-type cleaner that uses a wet cleaning solution, use it properly, and you'll be amazed at just how quiet vinyl can be.)
Garbage in is garbage out. So get rid of some/most of the garbage before you ever put it into digital form. Clean those records!
I know most of the records we're considering converting to CD can't be found on most of the peer networks I've been combing over the last year or so. I wouldn't be surprised if the guy asking the question has the same problem.
Some of the records never made it past vinyl format either. So it's not like we could pick up a CD copy at the store. I would assume this is one of the reasons that the songs aren't floating around the peer networks.
Just as a warning, most turntables do not output the same signal stength as a line-in is expecting. If you can, connect the turntable to a tuner or pre-amp that has an input jack labled "Phono" (which is probably wired to accept the lower phono signal) and then use one of the Rec outputs from the tuner to go into your computer. Otherwise, your recordings are going to sound even worse.
I'm just amazed at most people's ignorance of the musical quality of good vinyl. Sure CDs are handier and more rugged so lots of people are transferring LPs to CDs. 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.
When an audiophile chooses to transfer their cherished LPs to CD their primary concern is to minimize the distortion and noise which will be introduced. Buying used CDs isn't going to be the solution.
Steinberg Wavelab can automate by automatically finding track boundaries, your choice of plugins to clean it up is up to you... Arboretum Ray Gun, DART, Sound Forge Noise Reduction, all would be acceptable choices. I've had fairly good luck with the sond forge noise reduction plugin, but like all SF products its 16 bit.
...
However, a shitty sound card is going to do far more damage to the recording then the noise from the turn table. I would recommend an m-audio delta44 as probably the cheapest sound card that would fit the bill. You'll get a 97db DNR (in 24 bit mode) which is just better then the 96 db a cd can represent. The delta44 can be had for 270$ at 8thstreet.com
If your not going to buy a professional (read: outboard) sound card for the job -- then don't bother with noise reduction and such because the EMI generated by your computer will end up in your recording and make taking a noise-print impossible.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
...using bash (under cygwin) and sox? (Question: Does sox run under cygwin? I don't use windows, I don't really know...) I'm sure you won't have as many cool/funky/useful filters, but you might have *enough*; and the payoff, of course, is that you can just wrap the process in a big 'for' loop and come back in half an hour, switch sides, etc. /dev/dsp goes in one end, a pile of MP3's comes out the other. (I'm assuming that you don't want to burn to audio-cd; why copy from one obsolete format to another?)
;)
If you can't get sox or some other unix sound prog to work under 'doze, you might want to skip the cygwin/bash approach and learn enough VBscript in order to use the Windows Script Host. Icky, but probably effective; IIRC, you have access to most COM objects under WSH, so you might be able to invoke the necessary parts of your_favourite_doze_editing_suite from within that all-important. 'for' loop.
<digression>
Moral of the story: Never use an OS that has paltry support for basic computational and logical constructs. These are the true building-blocks of a computer; the fact that they're hard to get to under 'doze would, in a nice world, immediately ban its mention from polite company. This is not a UI-issue, this fundamentally affects the power (in the strictest semantic/logical sense) of the expressiveness of the computer-as-language.
(course, the same could be said of Bash's pathetic support for recursion, but until I finish writing that Emacs bootloader, we'll just have to run it in userland, on platforms well-suited to emulating EmacsOS.
</digression>
- undoware.ca
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...)
Yeah, gigantic PITA to fast forward, but still much easier and faster for the person recording.
However, someone who has a lot of older records probably wasn't song-hopping because of the sheer bother of changing records.
Nuisance to you and me, but probably not if you're used to records.
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?
I remember a test where they did double-blind testing involving the color of the exterior of the speaker. They had 4 identical units, and kept sliding different cases over top. The audiophiles insisted that the blue speakers had better highs, the red ones had better bass, etc.
I'm sure there's some old LP vs. CD wars in magazines back when the Sony CLP-1 or whatever it was came out (my dad still has it). But I doubt anything's been done in the last 10 years.
The quality of your vinal is a constant, unless you can find a different record to work with. However you can improve the record player. Many audiophiles insist they can hear the quality improvement with vinal and a good player. See if one will let your borrow his equipment for this job. It will probably mean working at his house, and buying a new neddle, but it might be worth it. (And of course under supervision so you don't break anything)
Remember, you are taking your last shot at these lps, so you want to do a good a job as you can. You may not be able to do it over.
YMMV, there is nice people who would love to help, and #%^^*&%@ who you don't want to deal with, in every hobby. Good luck, it is worth a shot.
You do know that you can't just patch the turntable into the card's line in. You need a pre-amp to boost (and equalize) the turntable's output to line level. Patching the turntable into an amp and taking the signal from the tape outputs should suffice.
In addition to pops and clicks, keep an ear out for subsonic artifacts (rumble) and make sure your turntable is physically isolated from the speakers to prevent feedback.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Its not even old stuff. You just have to have unpopular tastes ;-)
I've been looking forever for a nice new CD of T-Bone Burnett's "The Talking Animals" but can't find it anywhere. I don't even mind paying full price for it - despite already owning it on tape - 'cause I want a nice shiny copy of it.
Now this isn't an old record at all - 1987.
Hang on though, while googling the exact date it looks like Barnes and Noble say they have it. Blimey!
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?