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Ripping from Vinyl, Simplified
An anonymous reader writes "In a short article at linmagau.org
John Murray brings Gramofile to our attention, just the thing to help you bring all those LPs in the cupboard into your MP3 collection. One more example of the analog hole in action, I guess ;)" It may not be CEDAR, but it sounds like a lot of utility for a 76kB program.
if you want better quality when you are recording vinyl, a high end pro turntable such as Numark ttx1, (http://www.ttx1.com/) stanton str8-150 (http://www.stantonmagnetics.com/alpha44/tt_str8-1 50.asp)
does onboard digital, so you can get digital straight out into your computer.
better than your onboard soundcard.
(although you need a digital in....)
-----im billy troll----- im better than you at everything you do.
A similar, but non-linux solution is to use the extremely useful Griffon Technology iMic (USB audio) and their software, Final Vinyl on MacOS X (not everyone runs x86 hardware).
F.V. allows you to rip to wav or aiff and allows you to split tracks based on cue marks. It includes built in RIAA filtering and auto or manual gain and equalisation.
You just plug the iMic into you USB port on your Mac, plug the turntable directly into the iMic's input socket (well, ok, with an RCA to 3.5mm plug adapter), setup your preferred gain in F.V. and off you go.
David de Groot Snr Systems Engineer
What is does is;
Record a whole side at a time
Apply some filtering to remove clicks and pops
Find the gaps between tracks for you, and split the final tracks into individual files.
Not sure why you can't just go read the article; It loaded fine for me just now.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
I did this last November using a trial edition of Sound Forge and their lp restoral plug in.
It took a few hours' worth of fiddling (even with the plug in), but I finally constructed a digitized version of a recording made in the late 40's and it sounded excellent, save for the last disk which had an off center hole. It had varying pitch, which I was still able to tone down a bit.
The rest of the lps in the collection were in very good condition, but still had poor sound attributed to its 50+ year age.
I am unfamiliar with the results that the professionals produce, but even a simple trial version of Sound Forge can work wonders on old LP's for merely the cost of electricity and a blank cd.
There's lots of (quality) music released today that's released only on vinyl. DIY punk/noise, techno, electro and house, to name a few.
Personally (as a wannabe-DJ) I buy vinyl instead of CD (as a form of protest?), and preferably from small labels. And I've got a collection really old 7" artifacts and oddities. It's a big plus to get the tracks in mp3 (or ogg), for archival and sharing purposes (which I almost consider the same). After all, one day, you might not find a working turntable anymore...
Yes, I believe it's okay to share stuff that's limited to 500 pressings, sold out and almost impossible to find. There are actually labels that release their music on vinyl and free mp3 download.
The point of this post? Not really any, just wanted to let you know what this software might be used for.
I buy at least as much vinyl as I do CDs. I used Baudline to tune the setup before creating a digital representation of the music on my hard disk in the form of an OGG file.
I have a number of artists; old and new on heavy vinyl. Stunning.
Try this interesting experiment. Play a CD and a vinyl record of the exact same track into Baudline's spectrum analyzer and notice the average DB across the high frequencies. Doing so with Fugazi's "End Hits" album showed me that the CD cuts off above 16Khz while the vinyl continues to reproduce the signal up to 20khz.
Most people can't hear above 16Khz but such signals create harmonics that extent down into the audible range.
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
The one I use is a Musical Fidelity X-LPS, which I find works very well. You can plug it into your amplifier (which is how I use it for normal listening) and then connect your PC to the tape or MD output jacks of the amp to do the recording, or you could do it the other way and plug the X-LPS line-level outputs directly into the PC (I do it this way).
The critical thing when using Gramofile is to get the recording level right (this is the "igain" control in your audio mixer). If you get it wrong, you will saturate the A/D converter's input. This only needs to happen very occasionally to ruin the recording, and it normally happens at sractches. However, Gramofile, while it does a good job with scratches generally, can't deal so effectively with the aftereffects of saturating the soundcard's input (you tend to get a kind of echo of the crackle). So, even if it tells you that "0.0%" of the samples were at full-scale, check the actual number of full-scale samples.
The best way to do this in my opinion is to launch the ReZound audio editor. This will colour-code the full-scale regions of the sample file, enabling you to identify at a glance if you need to re-record.
Lastly, I suppose this is a rather obvious point, but the result of doing this will never be as good as the results you get listening to the original record. You can only lose information, not recover it. So, if you really care about those LPs, invest in a good turntable and cartridge! This doesn't have to be so expensive. I bought a second-hand LP12 earlier this year for less than 1/3 the price of a new one (obviously to do justice to it I will need to get a much better sound card than the one that comes on my PC's motherboard).
Offtopic, but can a native english speaker tell me why exactly semiconductor devices are also called "solid state" devices ?.
The term dates back to the 1960's when transistor radios were first developed. As the signal in a tube radio is processed from the radio spectrum to the audio output at the speaker, there are physical gaps within the tubes where the signal is transferred to radiant energy and sent across a vacuum that is a few millimeters wide. But in a "solid state" radio, the signal remains in solid materials-- wires, semiconductors, etc, for its entire processing.
At the time, the breakthrough of solid state technology was not seen as a matter of quality, but of reliability and portability. A portable tube radio required a car battery or portable generator, a case that would withstand the bumps of travel, spare tubes, and the tools and know-how to do tube replacements in the field. So a hundred pounds or more of delicate equipment to lug around, plus someone trained as the "radio operator". But a solid state transistor radio needed only a pocketful of nine volt batteries and a spare radio if you had to have back-up. Total weight less than a tenth of that of the tube option, and no special training required. Even fishermen in rowboats could now keep up with weather reports. It was a pretty big deal at the time.
I wouldn't say your query was off-topic. I think questions about the words used in a discussion are generally germane to that discussion.
Of course your inquiry did lead to this pedantic reply. But slashdot does no modding down for pedantry-baiting!
pedantically yours...
That HowStuffWorks article is wrong. It completely ignores the reconstruction filter in CD/DVD or D/A converter. Any well engineered D/A system will capture ALL of the information up to 1/2 the Nyquist frequency assuming you don't exceed the dynamic range. The reconstruction filter turns the stairstep output into a smooth analog representation and is a necessary step in any good D/A.
Even though PCM is limited to 65536 discrete steps, this amounts to over 90 Db of dynamic range in a properly dithered recording. Although a record does have a continous representation, it is limited to something on the order of 50-60 Db of dynamic range because of background noise and the physical limitations of the vinyl, the cutter, and the playback medium.
Continuous does not equal infinite!
- AlanH