Soundcard choice for vinyl records

Once they're cleaned, you're ready for the final step - recording! First of all, fire up Audacity, and then open your sound monitor right-click on the speaker icon on the taskbar and select Recording Devices. Make sure the sound levels don't go over the top of the bar, as that causes "clipping", and will make your recording sound crappy. If you are clipping, you can adjust the volume of your inputs using the software bundled with your sound card.

How To Rip Tunes From Vinyl To MP3 (Without Them Sounding Like Junk)

This is generally accessible by double clicking an orange colored speaker icon on the taskbar. A window will appear, go to the tab labeled "Line In". Set the recording volume to a level that won't clip I've got mine set at 15 , and adjust the playback volume to something that sounds good. Now that you've got that out of the way, put on a record, clean it off, and hit play.

In Audacity, make sure you're recording. Let it play all the way though the section you want; you may find it easier to record the whole album at once, and split up the individual tracks afterward while trimming off any excess. After you're recorded what you want, you can use several tools to clean up your recording. Use them at your discretion to clean up your recording. EDIT: Compression can help you get your recording as hot as possible before you export it.

Step 2: Set It All Up

Use discretion as too much compression takes all of the dynamics out of your recording and generally makes it sound crappy. In most cases modern recordings make heavy use of compression, which is why the latest Cage the Elephant album will sound much louder than, say, Led Zeppelin IV.

Once you've got your recording the way you want it, you'll obviously want to export it. Select the formant you want with the drop-down menu, give it a name, and hit "Save". A new window will appear, this will allow you to edit the details of the file. Fill in what you want and hit OK, and you're done! So that's it! Thanks for reading my instructable, if you have any questions or things that I might have left out, feel free to point them out, I'm always open to constructive criticism.

Have fun ripping your records! Reply 8 years ago on Introduction. He did a pretty killer version of it at Crossroads as well. I started doing this a couple years ago. Basically the same except I have an old SX TD Pioneer tuner amp with preamp out terminals to feed into the computer sound card. Lots of sound with 5. I picked up a dual cassette player at the thrift store.

Lots of cool tapes for 25 cents. Being cheap I use Audacity. More commercial software does automatic stop and start recording and other trinkets, you have to babysit audacity.

How to Record Vinyl Records to Digital Audio (MP3/WAV) Without A USB Turntable

I use an old Dual turntable in the system. I record from the turntable and cassette deck with good results. It's interesting the different audio production techniques noticeable at the time of recording, ie, today it is all about bass. With my system I have to boost the volume with Audacity short of clipping and I usually kick the bass a little in the range for the results I like. Some pop and click editing. I have a scan and stitch program to copy the covers front and back to print CD case liners so it looks like a smaller version of the old album.

Sometimes I photo the old disk and with printable CD's I print to original label and vinyl off center to give a look and feel. Reply 8 years ago on Step 5. Sounds like you have quite the setup! Definitely more complex than mine.


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I too have noticed that production techniques have changed greatly, most noticeably in the amount of compression employed. Seems like albums these days are just a homogenous mass of over-compressed tracks to the point of clipping, even with no dynamics. It's quite depressing. I also tend to steer away from newly "remastered" albums, which just means they ran it through a compressor a couple more times and deemed it "acceptable" by today's standards. Much preferable to rip the album yourself off of the record, that way you don't have to deal with someone else's idea of what sounds good.

It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine if you can't tell :P.

Guide to digitising LPs and cassettes | Hi-Fi Choice

I hadn't actually tried any EQ-ing, but that would probably help modernize them in a good way. Also very cool that you've taken the extra step of making physical copies. Keep up the good work! Thanks for the compliment. It's all home brew, not a lot of technical thought put into it, just what I have and find and make it work.

Love the thrift stores. The wife is getting on me for collecting the albums, but it's a cool hobby. I feel sorry for the MP3 generation. They don't get it, that their sound is faked so much. Even the concerts. I can't bring myself to get a MP3 player because my wife has one and the sound sucks. I record my albums to wav files for the best replay. What program are you using to add the metadata? I always drag my transferred songs into Itunes, and then add the metadata there. But I'm curious about other options.

I rip a lot of my records to computer. I transfer one full side at a time, and then use Audacity to chop the side into tracks. Repeat for each song. Reply 10 years ago on Step 5. When exporting out of Audacity, it will automatically pop up with a window that allows you to edit the metadata. I'm not sure if this is a feature only available in the 1.

I use a similar method when ripping my records. I record a whole side at once, then I highlight an individual song and copy it into a new instance of Audacity. That way I can edit global settings for that specific song without effecting the rest of the album. Also, I use the Sound Activated Recording feature so I don't have to be at my computer the whole time I'm ripping the record. Thank you. I have an mp3 blog, on which I share records out of print punk records , and the final step - of adding to itunes then adding metadata, then zipping the folder that's now in the itunes directory - has always felt like a wasteful process.

I don't do any noise removal on my transfers - I hadn't been happy with that Effect when I first tried it. It seemed to introduce digital noise. I'll check out Smart Recording, too.


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Thank you for this! The solution that offers the most choice, and probably the most bang for the buck, is to buy a conventional turntable perhaps secondhand and follow the steps above. Make sure you get one which stops at the end of the record so that you can leave your recordings unattended.

These can be connected directly to your computer's sound card with the cable pictured above. I Want to Record 78's If you want to record 78's, you must use a suitable stylus. The grooves on a 78 are wider than those on modern albums and a standard stylus will bump along the bottom of the groove and sound horrible. You do not, however, need a 78 speed setting on your turntable as VinylStudio can do the speed conversion from 33 or 45 rpm for you.

It will take longer to record each side, of course, and the results won't be quite as good. VinylStudio's audio cleanup tools , especially the hiss filter, are very useful with the sort of background noise you get on most 78 recordings. I Want to Digitize Tapes If you have an old-fashioned separate cassette deck, it probably has phono output connectors on the back and hence can be connected directly to your sound card as described above.

Almost all reel-to-reel machines also have such connectors. Another very simple solution for cassettes, which works surprisingly well, is to record from a personal cassette player Walkman using a cable with a 3. Dolby tapes might sound a little sibilant doing things this way but you can use VinylStudio's graphic equaliser to correct this if necessary. What Software do I Need? If you go for an all-in-one solution like VinylStudio, it should give you everything you need in a single package, and because it is designed to do precisely what you are trying to do, it is much easier to use than a collection of separate programs of a more general nature.

In addition to performing all the tasks described in this guide, VinylStudio helps you organise your collection as it grows, keeps your hard disk tidy and can save disk space. It can also import any recordings you might have made previously. The remainder of this guide gives you a brief walkthrough of the major steps involved in digitising an album using VinylStudio. There is also more information about VinylStudio elsewhere on this website, including the help file supplied with the software.