Converting vinyl records to MP3

In My Humble Opinion
1

I recently found a small cache of records, maybe 25. I’d like to convert them to MP3s or WAV files then put them back into storage.

In looking for a turntable, I found some that can save the files directly to a thumbdrive. Others can connect to a computer via USB. I’m guessing the latter is better as I theoretically can adjust the file quality.

Something that’s confusing me is the cartridge. Some are advertised as ceramic and some as magnetic. Which is better?

I appreciate any suggestions to make my turntable purchase easier.

2

Years ago my kids bought me an Ion USB turntable. I have no idea what kind of cartridge it has/had. I downloaded the free Audacity software and recorded all of our 325 vinyl albums to MP3 files. I captured them to my computer hard drive where I could edit them as necessary using the awesome Audactiy tools, and then put each album into iTunes. It took me well over a year, but I got it done.

3

I’m guessing the resulting MP3s sound good?

4

Yes, to my old ears, they sound fine. Audacity has a feature that will mask out the hisses and pops from old vinyl, although not completely. I have no issues with the quality, and that’s all I care about.

5

Jesus H. Christ on a pogo-stick – avoid ceramic like the plague! Those are very old-style cartridges that require heavy stylus pressure.

Not sure about turntables with auto-conversion capabilities – this is something I’ve never looked into. But I’d suggest possibly just evaluating turntables alone on their own merits, and then getting a separate quality digitizer, unless you can find a turntable + digitizer combo that’s well rated, but that’s less likely than sourcing the two components separately.

6

Another Ion owner here. I use Sound Studio instead of Audacity (because Audacity did weird-ass things to my input and output audio configs that affected all my other applications so it got banned) but otherwise as described above.

Before that, I had an actual component turntable and an amp and a twin RCA cable to single audio jack in adapter.

7

@railer13: Good to hear!

@wolfpup: Thanks! I vaguely remembered one was better than the other. Now I know.

@AHunter3: Another satisfied Ion owner. I may soon be too.

8

Sorry, I don’t know how to delete this post.

9

I use a digitizer similar to this, and then bog standard editing software (Audacity works just fine for me, there are others with different bells and whistles, but not really better quality.).

I’ll recommend against using an all-in-one turntable digitizer. Doing it in two steps let me have better control over levels and equalization when going from the raw file to the final product.

10

I’ll keep this in mind.

11

Huh. I’ve never had that issue and I have used Audacity on quite a few different computers.

Did you ever figure out what the issues were or did you just ban it and forget it?

12

If you have a song with a quiet passage, the converter thinks it’s a new song. I think I had one LP that ended up being broken into 99 “songs.”

13

I’ve also had good luck with audacity on a few different computers. I had to adjust the inputs and outputs to feed it, though.

14

Definitely a magnetic cartridge! A magnetic cartridge will require a pre-amp in order to feed the audio into your computer at the right volume. I’ve never had a turntable with a usb output so I don’t know if they come with a built-in preamp or how they work or sound. Audacity, as has been mentioned, is good, free audio recording software that allows you to eliminate clips and pops and suppress some noise. But shop around. There are others.

When shopping for a turntable, don’t go cheap! Read all the reviews you can and buy a unit that is within your budget and gets good marks. This project will take a lot of time and you want to be satisfied with it.

And although you only have 25 records now, the bug might bite you and you’ll find yourself scouring used record stores and flea markets for more. It can be quite addicting! I’ve seen it happen to many good men…and women too.

15

As I recall from using Audacity, the entire LP was one ‘song’. Then I ‘broke’ the large song into the individual tracks and labelled each one.

16

Not specifically, but I think it may have been unique to PowerPC MacOS version of Audacity, as the only other person I ever encountered with the same symptoms was also using it on a PowerPC Mac. After running Audacity, I could no longer play out to the computer speakers in any program — the damn machine would remain convinced that there were headphones plugged in and that it was using them. Rebooting into single-user mode, running AppleJack from the command line, and nuking all caches and plugging something into the sound out port and unplugging it after boot would sometimes reset it, but it might require several tries. Didn’t take many occurrences before I went looking for some other audio software package.

17

Oh interesting. I used it on a MacBook Pro, and it was always a little bit of a nuisance to manually switch the audio input to get it to work, but i had to do it manually and it was no great trouble to also undo it manually.

18

whatever you use, its 2023 - so avoid converting music into mp3 …

if you can go “loss-less”, go FLAC
if you go “lossy”, go OPUS

WIKI:

Opus is a lossy audio coding format developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force, designed to efficiently code speech and general audio in a single format, while remaining low-latency enough for real-time interactive communication and low-complexity enough for low-end embedded processors.[4][5] Opus replaces both Vorbis and Speex for new applications, and several blind listening tests have ranked it higher-quality than any other standard audio format at any given bitrate until transparency is reached, including MP3, AAC, and HE-AAC.[6][7]

19

Thanks all for your help. I appreciate it.

20

I did this with a device that let you plug in audio output from a phono or cassette player and had a USB output for your computer. It was cheaper than buying a phonograph that did it and let me do both. I had some real Dylan bootlegs that went from a record to reel-to-reel tape to a cassette tape, and digitizing them made them sound a lot better than they did on the cassette.
This was a long time ago, so I don’t know if this thing is still available. It came with its own software, so I’ve never tried Audacity.