Converting Audio from Vinyl to MP3? 50
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?
This comment brought to you on vinyl (Score:1, Funny)
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
MP3? (Score:2)
In case you missed this: (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Re:In case you missed this: (Score:2, Informative)
If you can find or buy the album on CD (used) it's worth the effort. It can take a LOT of work to clean-up a recording from vinyl, especially if the record hasn't been taken care of, and the purchase price of the CD, even if you have to get it new, can easily be worth it.
Never use Sound Recorder (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Never use Sound Recorder (Score:1)
Other than that, I agree with you -- There's so much better software out there than "sound recorder" to do the job. Heck, Cool Edit (even earlier releases) has been my recorder/quick editor of choice, and it does a few things (noise reduction) very well.
No... (Score:1)
Cool Edit, however, solved all my problems. Recorded without a hitch.
Re:Never use Sound Recorder (Score:1)
Why bother ripping.. (Score:1)
Just as long as you have broadband.
Re:Why bother ripping.. (Score:2)
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.
on a Mac? rip from records with N2MP3 Pro (Score:1, Interesting)
Buy Used CDs Instead (Score:1)
Why bother doing this? Because the studios have gone back to the original studio master tapes and re-mastered it onto CD. Even CDs of ancient recordings are wonderfully clear -- and clearly better than vinyl.
Figure 2 hours for each album you burn, vs. $7 for a used CD, and you'll see what's cheaper. Your time is money.
If used CDs aren't available, well, consider spluring and buying new. But skip MP3's. Do a CD per album. Skip the bother of trying to seperate the individual tracks out. Just play the album and record both sides onto one disk.
Re:Buy Used CDs Instead (Score:1)
Huh? Isn't one of the great things about CDs the fact that you can skip through the tracks?
I'd hate to have to "fast-forward" in 5 second steps through a 74 minute album.
Re:Buy Used CDs Instead (Score:2)
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.
Re:Buy Used CDs Instead (Score:2)
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.
WHOOP WHOOP "Golden Ear" Alert (Score:1, Funny)
Behold, folks, for we have a reader amongst us who either has "golden ears" capable of hearing distortion levels so small and subtle that they cannot be measured with cheap equipment. Using a green marker on the thin edge of a CD makes makes the lows lower, and the highs higher. Placing speakers upon mystical aliminium cones digs wonderful divits in your hardwood floors when the speakers shake -- and makes everything sound better. Thicker speaker cables, sooo thick they have act like capacitors, sound better because we all know speakers draw more amperage than pair of jumper cables.
The Sheffields were better than mass-produced plastic, but not as good as a bad CD. Audio compression (not as bad as FM radio, or worse GSM phones), nothing below 30Hz (except on the "Earthquake" movie soundtrack starring Charleton "NRA" Heston), and definitely nothing above 17Khz. But the hiss from those horny Klipsch "warbles like a bugler's coronet" speakers has probably dimmed your upper hearing.
Bollocks.
Re:WHOOP WHOOP "Golden Ear" Alert (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Buy Used CDs Instead (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Re:Buy Used CDs Instead (Score:2)
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.
Re:Buy Used CDs Instead (Score:1)
There's also the principle of the thing, not paying twice for something you've already got, when you're perfectly content with the quality you've currently got.
Re:Buy Used CDs Instead (Score:1)
Wow! This is great news! I wasn't aware that everything that was ever released on LP is now available on CD! When did this happen?
One of the first things I did after buying my first CD player was to buy CDs of all my favorite LPs. Unfortunately less than 40% of my LP collection was ever released on CD. New or used isn't the issue. It's not a matter of saving a few bucks. Why do you think there are services available that transfer your LPs to CDs for sometimes upwards of $50 per LP? Do people use these services to save money?
The fact is that many people, especially older people whose primary interest isn't pop or even rock music, have beloved old LPs that are never likely to be issued on CD. And how much non-pop/rock stuff has there ever been on Napster?
Transferring to CD has two advantages: LPs continue to wear out as they are played continuously, CDs to not, and CD players are much more readily available and easier to deal with than turntables: they don't require pre-amps, you can have them in cars and in portable players, etc.
So there is a real need out there for reliable ways of transferring LPs to CDs while trying to preserve as much quality as possible.
Re:Buy Used CDs Instead (Score:2)
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!
I think this can be done faster... (Score:1, Informative)
You should have a look to Total Recorder [highcriteria.com]. It's an app for Windows, that hooks the system audio stream. The good thing to know is that it can dump the sound it hooks to the disc. Better, it can convert sound to misc formats (including MP3, WMA and OGG) on-the-fly, using the CODEC you chose.
So you just have to connect your turntable to the Line In port, then launch the windows media tool and Total Recorder. I bet you will save a lot of time converting on-the-fly !
I did this a few times, and it worked perfectly, in no time
dBpowerAMP (Score:2, Informative)
how much work do you want to do? (Score:1)
E.g, say you rely on your recording software to split tracks for you by detecting x amount of silence. Are you going to check all the tracks and further split the ones that are run together (maybe there was no silence between them)?
I use CoolEdit 2000 [syntrillium.com] from Syntrillium for this kind of thing an amature restoration work. It's $69 and requires Windows. It has a lot of nice features for twiddling, including noise reduction. For clicks and pops, they have their Audio Cleanup Plug-in ($49) which can remove a fair amount of crackle/clicks/pops automatically (check the forums on their web site), though don't expect perfection. The quality of the results will be proportional to the amount of hands-on time you spend with each individual piece.
By the way, you'll probably get less noise if you record throught the line in on your card, as opposed to the microphone input.
Your methodology is faulty... (Score:4, Insightful)
...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!
Re:Your methodology is faulty... (Score:2)
Soundforge and EZ CD Creator (Score:1)
Now for the time element. After getting my process down, I now spend less than one minute per song including CD burning (but excluding recording time of course).
You could of course mail me the records and I'd be happy to tear them for you and send you back CD's (providing I get to add the vinyl to my collection;)
CoolEdit (Score:1)
And I tried all the programs I could get on warez to find the best one.
CoolEdit has scratch and pop removal and works very well but even with that I ended up hand editing the waveforms for ultimate scratch removeal (including cutting and pasting clean bars from other segments of the same music).
tbh a bit of crackle and rumble does you no harm, it feels like listening to vinyl.
If recorded over 100 lps to mp3 from my collection.
It's a very long process to do well.
I encoded them at 256k (and then did a subtraction of the resulting wave forms to see what I was losing and it's not much)
It is much quicker to get them from gnutella (if you can find them) or on CD but usually they are only 128k and it's hard to get complete sets for each album. Most of my music isn't out there to download.
I'd be charging your uncle for the privilege because having an mp3 jukebox of all his recordings is a luxury he will be very glad of.
I have wired up my whole house with speakers in every room running from various amps and PC's all getting their mp3's over the network. It's fucking great!
my biggest win was a pair of 4" speakers from Maplin mounted in the bathroom ceiling. My 12 year old needs encouragement to get OUT of the shower instead on IN to it now he can blast his music out in there without having to piss about running cables and choosing cds
LP Output != Line In (Score:3, Informative)
Wavelab and caveat (Score:2)
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.
Have you considered...? (Score:2)
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>
It can be done! (Score:4, Interesting)
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...)
Gramofile on linux (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Get a GOOD lp player (Score:2)
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.
Sony's "New" Product (Score:1)
From the New York Times [nytimes.com], December 6th:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/06/technology/circ
Vinyl to CD: There's No Need to Buy the White Album Again
By J.D. BIERSDORFER
Since the advent of recordable compact discs for the home market, humankind has been struggling with the eternal question: How can I get my Grateful Dead concert tapes from 1979 transferred to CD?
Sony has simplified the process with its EZ Audio Transfer and Restoration Kit. Users just need to supply the computer, CD recorder and tunes to transfer, and the EZ Audio kit does just about everything else to copy music from vinyl records, cassette tapes and other audio sources onto compact disc. The kit includes a 10-foot cable for connecting the stereo system to the computer, software to import the audio files and editing software that uses wizard programs to help the novice audiophile clean up the snaps, crackles, pops and hiss that can come along with the music.
The EZ Audio Kit sells for about $50 and runs on Windows 95 and later, although it will not work with some combinations of Windows and U.S.B.- based CD recorders. Users may also notice extra free space around the house once those old Kinks albums are sent to long-term storage.
Re:Sony's "New" Product (Score:1)
Be careful: Radio Shack may try to sell you a mono RCA-phone adapter. (Mono will have 2 metal parts separated by a plastic sleeve on the phone plug; stereo will have 3 separated by 2 plastic sleeves). The stereo one works perfectly for mono signals, but not the other way around.
Re:Sony's "New" Product (Score:1)
And depending on how good the software really is, you might only have to change the records, and it could do everything else.
Like I said earlier, though, I haven't been able to find any real reviews of the software, so who knows how functional it actually is.
Missing a piece of the chain? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
xmcd2make (Score:1)
Converting vinyl to CD (Score:1)
If you're on a windows platform, you could try our product RIP Vinyl, which sells for $7 for the full version. I wrote it because the breaking up of tracks was just too tedious.
The program automatically breaks the tracks, and records to CD ready 16Bit stereo, 44.1Khz wav files. Just wire up your system to line-in and you're off. You can download a demo version and get more info from www.wieser.clara.net/ripvinyl [clara.net]
Vinyl equalisation (Score:1)
Use a SW based parametric equalizer, and centre the frequency at 12Hz. Go -maximum the equalizer allows, with a narrow Q. (steep slope).
You can also use a high-pass filter, again at 12Hz so that everything below that frequency is cut.
If you have access to a high quality phono preamp use it's "rumble" filter, but in general you will have a higher quality filter in the digital domain (because high quality phono preamps don't have a low cut filter but cheap ones do). Read "cheap" as any reciever, regardless of cost (they don't spend a lot of money on this particular feature).