Digitizing 7" 45rpm records - what a pain!

[tdat7192]

Congrats! Good accomplishment. I started digitizing all my albums and did a handful of 45s. Had my sons helping which was good fun, opened their eyes to vinyl/turntables/and various musics. But I am finding it much more difficult to "browse" through a huge list of songs on a computer rather than browsing cd's and albums. Of course it is easier to find something specific but there are times, I dig out an album and realize that I have it digitized but I hadn't noticed it in the listing and end up listening to the album. I have hit a pause in the digitizing and will probably continue just for posterity sake and less so for listening sake.
I would be curious if others have had the same experience and, HamDog, if we come back to this thread in a year to see how it has worked out for you.
Ah it does make putting together music for parties infinitely easier however. Forget stacking records on a changer, toss 1000 songs in a playlist and random play them.

 

[HamDog]

tdat, it's a double edged sword. While I may miss some tunes by not easily going through flipping albums, I'll also enjoy a lot of the music that had hidden int those albums by being able to easily access it and have it pop up at random during shuffle play.

Maybe in a year I'll feel like spinning albums again. I've already digitized over 100 albums and cleaned them up so they're already in my catalog. I truly can't tell the difference in sound quality as I've captured them in 24 bit format. And I even get to listen to them in the car too!

As I have a small apartment, I'm even thinking about selling my entire vinyl collection and turntable once I'm done. Not sure yet, but pondering the thought.

 

[Anubis]

Hmm, I don't know...you could look at it a different way? Yeah, kind of bothersome if you want to fire and forget and go do other things, but on the other hand why not just sit down and enjoy. There are some things on the ol 7 inch 45's that never made it to albums and such. I have a nice size handful of 7 inch 45's that I will be digitizing soon and I'm just going to enjoy the process as some of them were not available on albums or just ones I picked up because I did not want the album. I haven't heard them in ages so it will be kind of interesting. I took the trouble to clean them all so might as well get my time investment out of them.
In fact, I'm doing my 45s first before I do my albums which I may well end up listening to them while they record as well. I tend to be somewhat anal about that sort of thing. I just finished digitizing all my cassettes and you can't tell me that wasn't a PITA type thing. Try setting the levels to digitize a cassette..all that winding and re-winding trying to find the loudest peaks! (After some thought and about 5 full album cassettes having to be re-done, I finally figured out an easier way).
Records and thus music is the reason for our hobby. That's why we go through such trouble with hunting and finding the gear to cleaning the records to all the care and maintence just to play the music. If it weren't for the music, we wouldn't be in this hobby.

 

[slow_jazz]

When your poor a 45 was all you could afford.

Usually sounded better also...

 

[HamDog]

I just finished digitizing all my cassettes and you can't tell me that wasn't a PITA type thing. Try setting the levels to digitize a cassette..all that winding and re-winding trying to find the loudest peaks! (After some thought and about 5 full album cassettes having to be re-done, I finally figured out an easier way).

Maybe I'm missing something here, but why go through all the headache of setting levels so accurately? Back in the analog days (making tapes), levels were very important to achieve the highest signal to noise ratio. But in the digital age, after our recording, we can use the "normalize" or "amplify" feature of our software to achieve the same thing. I always pull back from the peak and let Audacity "normalize" it later.

And why would digitizing a tape be different from LP's? At least with the tape you don't have to get up every 3 minutes to flip or change records like digitizing 7" vinyl!

Records and thus music is the reason for our hobby. That's why we go through such trouble with hunting and finding the gear to cleaning the records to all the care and maintence just to play the music. If it weren't for the music, we wouldn't be in this hobby.

I agree 100%! It's all about the music. By digitizing, I'm making the music more accessible. As much as it's a pain to get up every 3 minutes and change records while digitizing 150 records, it did feel good listening to stuff I hadn't heard in years. I just had stopped playing 45's.