Ripping records to mp3

[elizilla]

I'd been planning to rips records to mp3 for some time, but I couldn't get my desk cleared enough to bring all that stereo equipment up here, so I kept putting it off. But yesterday it occurred to me that instead of bringing the stereo to the computer, I could bring the computer to the stereo. So I plugged my old laptop into the stereo downstairs, and started playing records.

The gadget I am using to connect the stereo to the laptop is a thing called a Xitel Inport. I bought this when I was doing the cassettes, the cost was about $40. It's a little box that contains the necessary functions of a sound card, with a pair of RCA jacks for input, and it outputs to the PC through USB. The living room stereo didn't have a RCA line out, but I have lots and lots of audio cables, so I was able to find an adaptor cable that can take the headphone jack from the stereo and send it to RCA.

The software I used for the cassettes, Cakewalk Pyro, contains a tool to remove the little snaps and pops, and it works pretty well, though if you turn that function up high enough to completely obliterate the louder pops, it does something weird to the peak sound levels. I susepct that what it's doing, is cutting out the frequency where the pops occur, and at peak sound levels maybe it needs that frequency to sound right.

I think the rips of these records sound slightly better than the ones I did last fall from the cassettes. There's quite a bit of overlap between the record collection and the cassette collection. Once I finish ripping all the unique stuff, I may try making new mp3s from the records to replace some of the poorer quality ones I got from the cassettes.

Comments

[ericcoleman]

I've been using a 30 dollar Behringer 2 channel mixer that I put into the line in on my laptop and I use Roxio to cut it into pieces and then burn it to CD. It's been working great. I just need the time to transfer more stuff.

[tomatoe333.livejournal.com]

I'm a purist. But I'm also an engineer. :-) So I use a home-built preamp to boost the cartridge up to line-level, and I feed that into the soundcard.
The reason the click-and-pop software sometimes catches the peaks is because it works by looking for peaks in the signal. If the cymbal hit looks similar to a click or pop, the software blanks it out. Your best strategy is generally to clean the record as well as possible before recording it. Sometimes even playing it 2-3 times will loosen some of the dirt out of the grooves.

[hotwire7.livejournal.com]

Do any of these software tools do a decent job of separating the tracks? I started this task years ago and didn't find any adequate tools then, advertising claims to the contrary. What do you recommend?

I can put on an LP side at a time while doing something else, but starting and stopping and lifting the needle after every song is just not practical.

Question 2, maybe this one is for you tomatoe333. I have a good stereo so phono preamp with RIAA compensation etc, and line out is easy. Can't I run that straight to line in on the PC? Does the quality of the soundcard or built in equivilant really matter?

[elizilla]

I'm using something called Cakewalk Pyro. It doesn't do the tracks automatically, but you don't have to lift the needle after each track either. You play the whole side into one WAV file, which you can then bring up on your screen and look at. You can see the peaks and valleys, and the time is graphed. You can adjust the time scale to get down to whatever level of detail you need. You can start playing from any spot. You use this tool to decide where you want the tracks split, and click to put in a track marker.

If the tracks are all well separated on the album, the album's in good condition, and none of the songs have long silent pauses in the middle, I can put all the track markers in in about 10 seconds. But if the tracks segue into each other without ever having the music stop, or the record is so messy that the breaks between tracks are full of crackling, or there are pauses in the songs, it's harder. Then I have to listen to snippets, maybe compare the times listed on the album for each track, etc.

I could see how a computer might automate cutting the tracks on the records that have those nice clean track breaks. But I don't know how it could possibly handle the ones where one song segues into another, or the ones with pauses.