What do you use to rip vinyl?

(Please!)

(Why record at 48k, electricsound?; charltonlido: I've got to give you those records back! It must've been 18 months by now!)

(OR Go to the library and borrow the CD & rip it.)

(Gareth: sorry! I could blame my new dad status but that only covers the last three months. Email me and we'll meet up in town one lunchtime/post-work).

I can make no sense of what anyone has said so far. What are the basics? What do you connect to what, with what cables? What software is needed etc? etc?

I have a laptop running XP, with i-tunes on it. Can I hook this up to my stereo somehow? What output etc?

jamie: you need sound studio. get it here. you'll get 30 days' use before you need to register.

both my macs have line-in so i can't help with yr tascam thing, but i'm assuming that sound studio will deal with it quite happily.

the default settings should be fine. 44khz, stereo, 16-bit ... i forget the rest, but it's easy. the software has a level meter so you can get a decent recorded volume.

once you've recorded one side of an album, you simply save it then put in a "marker" (apple-M) between each track. then you hit "split by markers" and it saves each track out as a separate AIFF file. add the AIFFs to your iTunes library, fill in the names, then convert them to MP3/AAC/format of your choice. and bob's yer uncle.

As stated above, Audacity will happily record stereo audio from your soundcard input at 16-bit/44.1kHz quality. Set it going, drop the needle on the record and adjust levels within Audacity. Use the editing tools to lop off the crap at the beginning and end and Bob's your uncle.

http://www.djgear.co.uk/images_products/m/lea03985_m_v1.jpg

one end goes in "tape out" on your stereo, one end goes in your computer. on the mac, OS X and sound studio do all the hard work for you. on a wintel box, i imagine you'll spend several lifetimes of pain and misery fucking about with stupid text files, but i am, as you can tell, vastly prejudiced.

No audiophilia prizes, but tracks I've recorded this way have sounded surprisingly fine on my iPod.

x-post

OK so I think I get the picture - but the audio interface (which is replacing a soundcard in my setup) thing I have hasn't got phono inputs, only 1/4" line ones. So, will running a phono to 1/4" jack lead out of the master of a dj mixer into the audio interface be ok or will that have already crapped the sound up before we even get to the conversion/encoding etc. bit.

The 'that' was Mike Jones's post

the number with 'kHz' after it is the frequency of sampling when converting from analog to digital. The more frequent the samples, the more information captured.

the number with the '-bit' after it is how much space the computer uses to store each sample. More space = a more fine-grained scale for recording value. In 8-bits, your scale is only 256 values, in 16-bit it's over 65,000, and at 24-bit you're up to over 16 million values.

Standard CD audio, I think it was mentioned, is 44.1kHz, 16-bit. Most people recording for archiving or preservation will record at higher values, from 48kHz/24-bit, all the way up to 96kHz/48-bit. Of course if you're doing that, you'll need a lot more disk space, an expensive analog/digital converter, and you'll want your whole signal path to be excellent, from clean records, to good stylus/cartrige, to good turntable to good phono preamp, etc.

Still, if you have the tools & the disk space, I think it's worth recording at higher rates if you're going to all the trouble of ripping vinyl anyway.

(Archibogs basically correct though it's worth pointing out that higher sampling rate essentially = higher frequency cut-off, so you may feel that exceeding the upper limits of human hearing [44.1k = max of 22.05kHz] with higher sampling rates in yr recording is wasteful. Higher bit-rate = lower noisefloor and, again, even the best vinyl set-up won't be troubling the 90dB+ scope of 16-bit. For mixing/post-processing, certainly go with 24bit if you can spare the disk space).

believe it or not, that was the key reason i chose the powerbook over the ibook.

You shouldn't have a problem with sound degredation running an adapter cable from phono to audio in, but Michael Jones' advice about amplification/equalization is v. important. I use a turntable with a built in preamp so I can hook the turntable's output chord directly to my computer's audio in with an RCA to mini-stereo cable. I use Audacity as well, editing and exporting sound formats are pretty intuitive.

I've used Audacity then trimmed to the silence, but you probably want to use some of the software that detects gaps and seperates tracks automatically. Let me know if you find a good one!

Your 1/4 inputs are most likely mono and your Vinyl is stereo most
likely.

Xpost.

Help!
So I have ripped my Beatles lp box to huge wav-files using Audacity. Two files for each lp, one for each side. Is there another way to make single song mp3s than by cutting those files in Audacity, exporting the selectiosn as mp3s and then entering song, album, artist etc. tag info by hand? There must be a software doing this, or do I have to do the monkey job?

get a what.cd account. download box set lp rips.

or do the monkey job.

sorry, not meaning to be a smartass but there are great vinyl rips on what.cd and it's going to take you ages to do the editing and tagging. as far as i know, there's no way to automate the editing. you may be able to get some software to tag them for you.

monkey job is the only way I know of

make sure to run the cut files through something like xACT or Traders Little Helper to remove the Sector Boundary Errors that cutting tracks can sometimes create, or you may end up with tiny gaps where you don't want them.

Vinyl studio sounds perfect for what you want to do, I tried it out two weeks ago and
Wished I had bought it years ago. Turns dubbing ( not ripping) vinyl into a one stage
Process. Worth the $30.

Thanks for the advice, I'll try it.

get a what.cd account. download box set lp rips.

or do the monkey job.

― brotherlovesdub, Tuesday, 25 October 2011 18:19 (2 hours ago)

What's with the invite deal? I hear the site name thrown around all the time but can never seem to find anyone whom actually "belongs" to it

i have one invite kelpol, i'd send it to you if you want.

i don't really understand that what.cd thing. is it a kind of napster of the modern age where you can download stuff for free? that's not exactly what i want. i ripped my vinyls just to avoid pirating. besides i'd like to have the hiss and noise of my lps. they have their own, individual sound. they are mine, i have made them to what they are today, some have been loved to death, others have one scratch at one specific point, a scratch i want to hear as i have listened to it so many times. a scratch which has become an integral part of the record. ;-)

but if that scratch got there due to repeat spins, and that is why you love it, why wouldn't want to continue to play the vinyl and create more lovable moments?

bld, I sent you an email - so if you still have it, thanks in advanced!

thanks for reminding me to plug in this new vinyl converter thingee I got for my bday

Automatic labelling based on silences

If you have well defined silences preceding the starts of each track, go to the Analyze menu > Silence Finder. Silence Finder will attempt to automatically label the track split points based on the silences between the tracks.

If Silence Finder is not in Audacity you can obtain it as a Nyquist plug-in by left-clicking this link. If the plug-in appears in the browser window instead of downloading, you can instead right-click over the link > Save Target As or Save Link As. Alternatively, select and copy the full text in the browser window, paste it into a new empty text file in Notepad or similar text editor, ensure wordwrap is off then save it as silencemarker.ny. When you have the file correctly saved, move it into the Plug-ins folder inside your Audacity installation folder and restart Audacity. On Windows machines, Audacity's installation folder by default is at:

C:\Program_Files\Audacity or C:\Program_Files (x86)\Audacity on a 64-bit computer.

On Mac OS X, it is usually under Applications.

If there is a long silence after the end of the last track, Silence Finder may well add a superfluous label here. To delete this label and the silence, select the area of audio you want to cut and drag the selection down into the Label Track, then Edit > Silence or Edit > Delete.

wow everything's coming in mono. that's fucking irritating.

CueMaster
+
Medieval CUE Splitter

Various turntables > Bellari - VP130 Tube Phono Preamp > Saffire sound card > Cubase or Audacity.

Granted, I don't do a whole lot of this, mostly ripping advance white labels for mp3s for our web store, so the labeling thing is not so much an issue.

Does a very nice sounding rip though, and hopefully this Winter I will find time to rip all those 78s I've been meaning to do for the last... uh... 10 years or so.