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Digitizing vinyl

Carraway

Carraway

Well-Known Member
I thought I'd start a thread for people's experiences, suggestions or questions on digitizing vinyl.

Thanks to this forum and the DeOxit guide, I resurrected my pre-amp with a phono stage and with it, my turntable. Then, filled with the energy of turkey and fixings, I started digging up my vinyl, found a lot of things I'd missed and decided to try digitizing a few albums. I've been feeling my way through it, but here's my process, as wrong as it may be.

Turntable -> phono input on preamp.
Preamp tape 2 monitor out (tape 1 out is still had issues)-> RCA to miniplug -> Macbook running Audacity. (Audio port changed to input).

Audacity sample rate is at 96K, but the files have been huge. I'll set it to 48K for the next one.

I record a full album into a single Audacity track. Afterwards I copy each piece into its own Audacity track, cutting some of the beginning/end space. (I remembered to leave some end space so the digital version isn't jammed together).

I then export each track in AIFF format. I tried experimenting with some others, but they need additional downloads, including MP3s. So I've used AIFFs for now.

The next step is I adding files to iTunes (and add a photo of the cover). They worked well on my laptop, but I received a "Nope" notice when trying to put them on my phone. So I reset my iTunes' import settings from Apple lossless to Mp3 at 320Kbps. I then convert the files in iTunes (so each album has both an AIFF and MP3 file). The MP3s will play on my phone, so I was able to do some errands today while listening to an album I haven't heard in a long time.

I'll probably need to use a separate hard drive if I want to save the Audacity project files; each LP file is over a gigabyte at 96K.

So, any ideas?
 
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Even that workflow is longer than it needs to be. After I'd captured into Audacity (I didn't need any manipultations) I just selected each song and chose export selection to FLAC (since that was my final format) and was even able to put all the proper tag info in the export dialog except the cover art which was easy enough to do. Cool part is each subsequent export starts with the same tag info so all I had to change each time was the track number and title.
 
I do a lot of vinyl to digital conversion plus additional cleanup and reengineering as needed (by a lot I mean a few hundred or more per year. I did 19 LP's in three days last week alone). Sound Forge Pro 11.0 is the only program I use anymore and I like it better than anything else I've tried in the past 6-7 years. I use it so much it's become an obsession for all my projects that use audio (I take old movies, transcode them to .mp4 using Nero Recode and fix issues in them as well). After a while you begin to understand what was and wasn't done when the original recordings were mastered. It's not an easy learning curve though and requires a LOT of time to get right even if you have past audio engineering experience.

In my case a few years of constant trial and error paid off when my work came to the attention of a real record company and they began sending me all of their analog to digital conversion work. Getting access to original master tapes has been extremely rewarding when I get to work with things that haven't been heard since they were recorded in the 60's. Of course a program like Audacity is far too limited for professional grade production work but is much easier to use for beginners even though the final results can't really be compared equally. If you're a true audio neurotic Sound Forge Pro 11.0 will open a world of things you can do that weren't even dreamed possible a decade ago for the home studio user. If you want your transfers to sound like copies of LP's Audacity works fine, if you want them to sound like studio-quality masters a program such as Sound Forge Pro 11.0 is the only way to go but the price of the software and learning time required to use it properly as a tool will dissuade 98% of the users on forums such as this one.
 
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