Copying Vinyl to CD?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve recently learned that there is a method of copying old 33-1/3 records to CDs. I don’t quite understand it, but it goes something like this: The record player (turntable) has an audio output port. Some kind of cable goes from there to a peripheral device that converts the analog signal from the record to a digital signal and then onto the PC. From the PC you burn a CD with the music files.

I think it’s that middle device and the corresponding software that can be expensive.

As the owner of far too many old records, I’d love to be able to copy and then discard them, saving a few with good album art.

Any idea of how this process actually works? Is my understanding close? Has anyone tried this – and with what results?

2

I’m no audio engineer, but it seems like it should be pretty easy to me.

Record player -> Sound card Line In -> Record to .wav using… something -> Encode to mp3, burn it to CD, whatever you like

A quick check shows that Windows Media Player no longer appears to record audio. Funny I remember doing that in Win 3.11…
Check what software came with your soundcard, there’s certainly something free online. I think the only equipment you really need to do that is a 1/4"->1/8" microphone cord.

3

This is neither difficult nor expensive unless you want to do digital noise reduction. Most computers come with software for digital recording. For example, Windows has a very simple program called “Sound Recorder”. If your machine has a CD-R burner, it also has software for burning CD-Rs.

Don’t try to route the output of your turntable directly into the computer. The output level is too low. Instead, route the line out of your amp or pre-amp into the line in of your sound card. When you tell the sound recorder program to start recording, it will tell the sound card to start converting its analog input to digital samples. You can tell it to store the digital samples in a sound file. You should tell it to produce a file with 16-bit stereo samples at a sample rate of 44.1 KHz. Once you have recorded an album to your hard drive, you can then use the CD-burning software to transfer the files to a CD. Tell the software you are making an audio CD.

You can also convert the audio files to MP3 format and burn an MP3 CD. Most new CD players will play MP3 CDs. The advantage is that you can put a whole bunch of music on one CD. The main disadvantage is loss of sound quality (the more compression you use, the worse the sound). You may also find it difficult to play particular albums or tracks when you have so much stuff on one CD.

The quality of your results depends on the quality of the sound card in your machine. Most new machines have halfway-decent sound cards. Older machines come with poor sound cards (anyone remember the old SoundBlaster 16?). I’d suggest listening carefully to a few of your homemade CDs before you get too far with this process - you don’t want to transfer dozens of records only to discover that you don’t like the sound.

There are also CD-R recorders that don’t require a computer. They are sold as stand-alone units that you hook up to your amp. These work pretty much like tape recorders and are very easy to use. You don’t have to store intermediate sound files, nor do you need to learn to use any software. The main disadvantage of these machines is that the use special CD blanks that are more expensive than computer CD blanks. Transferring a bunch of albums using a stand-alone burner will take you much less time and effort than if you do it with a computer. You can decide for yourself whether you’d rather invest the money or the time.

4

My record player had a cable attached to it like an RCA cable with the yellow and white ends. Assuming yours didn’t, that’s generally what you’d buy. Then I bought an adapter at radio shack that plugged into that cable so the end looked more like the end of a pair of headphones. That got plugged into the line in jack of my computer.(I didn’t have a problem with the volume with this method) The program I used was Polderbits Sound Recorder which you can download from tucows.
http://www.tucows.com/preview/194683.html
You get 14 free days and then it’s 29.95. I thought it worked very well. It lets you divide the record into tracks after recording with little hassle.
-Lil

5

By coincidence, I finally got round to starting this task yesterday, after promising my dad for ages that I could put his old Glenn Miller LPs onto CD.

It is a very simple task (or at least it was once I had taken apart his old record player which had seized up through lack of use, and freed it up with some WD40!)

Basically, as noted above, you just have to run a cable from the turntable to the line-in port of your PC (coloured blue on my machine, I don’t know if this is standard). One important thing to note is that the signal does need to be amplified - the raw signal from turntables would give a very tinny sound. The turntable I used had a built-in preamp (ie the speakers would connect straight to the turntable) so I was able to use the turntable’s headphone socket as an output, but if you are using a standalone turntable, don’t use the line-out - make sure you connect it to an amplifier and then use the headphone jack or line out of the amplifier. This will give you a much better sound. As far as the cable goes, assuming your line-in socket is the same as mine, you need a cable with both ends “male”, and a 3.5mm jack on the PC end and (for me) a bigger 6.35mm (1/4") jack on the other end. Obviously your mileage may vary, but these cables are easily found in a hifi shop.

Anyway then it is simply a case of using a program which will record the sound to a WAV file, clean it up a bit and split it into separate tracks. Lots are available as freeware or shareware with a free trial period; I am using Groove Mechanic which seems to work very well. It has detailed step-by-step instructions regarding adjusting the volume level, cleaning up the audio, and splitting the tracks.

This program doesn’t actually do the CD-burning stage, but this is a trivial step. The final result from Groove Mechanic will be a number of WAV files, one for each track. You can use Windows Media Player to burn these onto a CD, but I don’t use this because it inserts gaps between tracks, as it uses “Track At Once” recording. It is better to use “Disc At Once” recording; I use the trial version of Roxio Easy CD Creator that came with my PC and it is simply a case of dragging and dropping the files and clicking Record. Job done.

6

You might also want to check out a freeware sound recording/editing package called Audacity - it will handle the capture of the incoming audio, cleaning up and conversion to MP3 (if your CD writing software requires it - some of them will accept uncompressed .wav files).

7

You also have to make sure the recording levels are ok. Go to Volume Control (for me it is the “speaker” icon on the tray in the right hand corner), then Option, Properties, and check recording. It will show a slider control for the input levels. Mine had been set to low and no sound came in when I tried to record. It took a little bit to figure that out.

If the icon is not in your tray you can find these controls in the Control Panel Sounds icon.

8

I started recording my vinyl a few months ago and it works just like everyone else has said. Turntable -> Amp -> Sound Card
In my case, I’m using software from Creative that came bundled with my soundcard (WaveStudio?) Unfortunately, the software lacks filters so taking out the small scratches can be time consuming.

9

I have transfered a large number of my LPs (and 78s as well) to CD. In hindsight I think I might have been better off buying the CD version of the album. The quality will be better than doing it yourself and it does take a lot of time to do this. Not only do you have to record the CD in the first place but you should also listen carefully to your recorded CD afterwards to make sure it was done right. But if you’ve got the time, go for it.

And I wouldn’t toss out those LPs after you’ve recorded them. There are people who collect them and you might have a couple valuable ones. Find a used record store in your area and see if they’ll buy them. At the least, donate them to Goodwill and get a tax write-off.

10

There are a few things you need to consider before starting this.

As the previous poster stated, is the material you wish to record available on CD ? for the reasons already mentioned.

Is the material very rare ? Or do you really need to put it onto another medium to protect your existing vinyl ?

It could be that you wish to create an archive which you can transport easily, and whose loss is acceptable compared to the loss of your source material.

Assuming you still wish to transfer that old vinyl, you would be surprised at how valuable some of it can be, what might be well known to you might easily be an extreme rarity in another part of the world, David Bowie fans take note, and Van Morrison fans too.

You might wish to reconsider hanging on to it.

Next you need to decide just how high a quality of audio file you need to produce.

You can go to very high standards, the current top end consumer market is running at 24 bit sound and 48khz sampling rates, but not much further on you will find some soundcards that deliver 24 bit sound at a true 96KHz sample rates, damn near studio grade.
Some cards simulate even higher sample rates but these are not true sample rates.

Naturally, the higher the quality, the more you pay, motherboard sound is really not up to this, as you can get a CD from it but the sound will be very flat and lack dynamics (punch and power)

A good soundcard for all round might be the Creative Audigy series, these are rather too many things to too many people and so sound conversion quality suffers slightly compared to a specialist card.

Whateve card you choose, you will most likely get software to carry out exactly the task you require.

Here is a link to a soundcard comparison which will give you an overview of the issues you face.

http://www.tomshardware.com/video/200308211/index.html

It will give you some idea of what you need to consider.

Here is a message board where lots of folk would be very willing to help you out,

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?
I personally would recommend either a good Terratec product, or something from M-Audio or perhaps STA(Hoontech).

I would not advise you to try use USB devices, all the reports I’ve read on them conclude that they are inferior to PCI cards, by a long way.

Connectiing your turntable to your soundcard -

First thing you must know is that Vinyl is dynamically compressed, this means that the amplifier used to replay it has to be able to uncompress it.
This is done using the widely known RIAA standards, and all turntable use it, however…

Some turntables have an inbuilt pre-amplifier that performs this function, and most do not, this usually means that you must have a special RIAA equalised input device on your soundcard, and all those I have mentioned do so - you can just plug your turntable into the card and away you go.

If you do not have an input to your soundcard that is specifically RIAA equalised, then you must connect your turntable to your hifi amplifier, seek out the line-out connection from the amplifier, and connect that to your soundcard.

It is much, much, much, better to create an audio file and store it on your hard drive, before you write it to CD - I strongly urge you to do this.

The chances are that you will need to record you vinyl a few times and erase unsatifactory results before you commit to CD.

There are several formats for storing audio files, the best known is, of course, MP3 but for your purposes this would be unsatisfactory.

The problem with MP3 files is that they are compressed to save space, but in doing so they also lose information that cannot be recreated.
You might have noticed that an audio CD takes up around 700Mb od space, but the MP3 files of that smae material take up perhaps 200Mb of space.

If this vinyl is important to you, then the loss of music information is unacceptable.

I suggest that you should put your vinyl to .wav format first, this takes up a huge amount of space though, so you would need to compress it.

There are a few lossless compression formats available, they have slightly differant algorithms and the end product is usually around half of the original .wav file - the big advantage is that there is no loss of sound quality.

I’d take a look at the following -

http://www.mp3-converter.com/monkeys_audio.htm

This program is free, it is also simple to use and very high quality output.
It is also supported by Winamp plug-ins, a number of other Audio players can run Monkey files too - unlike some other lossless compression formats.

Once you have put your vinyl on to your hard drive, you will then have the means to clean up the sound, improve the dynamics, get rid of scratches, crackles and hiss - this will take you several goes on various settings in the tools section of such sound editing software and then you will find something that you prefer.

That software should come with your soundcard.

11

I haven’t been able to get onto the SDMB all day so was unable to check the responses until now. Thanks for all the good ideas.

The process doesn’t seem as difficult as I first thought it would be; now it’s the sound quality that I guess I’m most concerned about. The cost to replace records with CDs would be high as I’d be replacing fifty or so minimum, 200 or so max. I suppose that I’d be copying some only because I have them to copy - I doubt I’d replace them if they’ve been damaged over the years.

I’m going to go ahead and start the process keeping in mind that if it isn’t worth it I can always buy CDs of those I really want.

Thanks again.