Let’s say that, as is probably common for people of a certain age, I still have a fair amount of LP’s, but no longer own a turntable. And let’s say that even if I did, I don’t have the desire or the expertise to connect the turntable to my computer and rip .mp3’s from the LP.
Are there any commercial enterprises that do this stuff? Where I could mail them an LP, and they would mail me back a corresponding CD?
(and if not, why not?)
I think that would boil down to unauthorized commercial reproduction of copyrighted work.
I have seen these companies, but they charge a buttload of money to perform the process. If you have the equipment (turntable, amplifier), you’d be better off doing it yourself. If you don’t have the equipment and you have a lot of vinyl to transfer, it may be worthwhile to purchase or borrow it.
I have had pretty good success transferring vinyl to CD just using the sound card in my computer.
Are there any how-to instructions for doing this? I have a mother lode of old vinyl and a turntable, but it is somehow always too much trouble to turn it on.
The cost of having someone else do a decent job of digitizing a vinyl album would exceed the cost of buying the CD. It would have to a very rare recording that you couldn’t find online for cheap.
Go to a thrift store, garage sale, whatever. Get a $10 record player. (Check the needle and turntable speed first.)
You cannot just hook up the turntable to the soundcard. If the turntable doesn’t have linelevel outputs (I actually have one that does), you need to feed it into the phono inputs of a stereo and the line out of that from into your soundcard.
There is software for ripping vinyl to digital. It will have tools for removing pops and such, finding the song breaks, etc.
The chances are quite high you will be disappointed with the results unless you use quality equipment and software.
I have all the right stuff and I don’t waste my time doing the conversion.
So, you’re back to buying the CD.
I’ve been working on some of the vinyl I got - lots of my old tunes can’t be found on CD. Much of my music has not been re-released as a cd, so for personal use and so that I can sit for more than 30 minutes while I am playing my music, I have converted vinyl to mp3. These are personal copies for use of keeping my vinyl pristine.
I don’t know SDMB’s policy on creating personal copies of music - but I do not think it is illegal, otherwise why would those new Cd’s have digital wma files on them for your personal use, so I think SmackFu is kinda carried away with his unauthorized copy thing and I will let you know the method.
Use an rca to mini stereo cable - hook the rca out from the stereo’s equalizer output for best results ( you can also use your stereo’s speaker out jacks if you are without an equalizer ) - hook the mini jack into line in on your sound card. If you don’t have line in - use the microphone jack (but beware some mic jacks are handle only mono - you could end up with monocastic stereo which is same sound on both left & right channels).
Do all adjusting of levels on the stereo to get the right bass & center (these are more important than treble for a full sound) - and turn the volume lower, then go into the sound settings on your computer and under advanced pull line-in or mic up to the top.
Use whatever software to record you have, you can use what came with windows (sound recorder) or what came with your soundcard (creative’s recording stuff is great) to record the sounds to wav files.
I have nice pristine records - no pops & scratches (they lived in sleeves in a basement for the past few years so they needed a bath but they’ve never had icky fingers all over them) - so cleaning up pops & scratches is not an issue.
Once I sit there & listen to one side while it was recording, I save the wav, and then I start cutting it.
I don’t process the highs or lows or get rid of any of the sound - I find that destroys the authentic sound - if I wanted pristine digital sound - I wouldn’t have pulled out the vinyl in the first place.
After I’ve cut up the wav files into separate files I use EAC (Exact Audio Copy with LAME) to encode to mp3 and I end up with files that sound better than my mp3’s of Cd’s (Case in point: I recently copied a newly remastered Machine Gun Etiquette vs. the original LP which I copied a year ago to wav files & made mp3s from ---- Results: The vinyl copy sounds way better despite both being at compressed as 192k mp3s and recorded to wavs at the same levels - I deleted the remastered copies)
It takes time but if it is quality of recording or rarity are things you are after vinyl is worth it. It is time consuming but worth it for the music you really want.
oooooooooooohhhhhh - after two and a half years - I finally hit my hundredth post with that one!
turntable => phono in (amp or receiver);
line out/rec out (amp or receiver) => line in on sound card.
sound card probably came with some kind of record/edit software.
Start it, start turntable, click “record”, lower tonearm.
click ‘stop’ after end of record.
Find software to edit (if necessary) and record to MP3 or WAV on CD-R
lexi: I presume you are speaking about the outputs of an external graphic equalizer. AFAIK, the line outputs of most stereo receivers do not pass the tone or volume settings of the receiver.
Also, I would firmly disagree with your recommendation of feeding speaker outputs to the computer input. At best this will result in mediocre quality and at worst could damage the stereo and/or the sound card.
Another option, instead of going through the stereo, is to get a phono preamp from Radio Shack (probably $10 or $20) and plug the turntable into it, and send the preamp’s output into the line input of the computer. Then you monitor the sound through the computer speakers and make all level and tone adjustments in the software. This may be simpler, but the downside is that if your computer’s speakers are not high quality, you may not be able to properly judge the effects of the adjustments you’re making.
But be warned that the same could be true if you playback through your stereo, since that does not reflect what the computer is actually recording. Before you spend a lot of time making recordings, test the first one or two (i.e. record, copy to CD, and playback the CD on your stereo) to make sure the quality is acceptable. A common problem is ground loop hum. Make sure the turntable is grounded properly and that the computer and all the stereo components are plugged into the same electrical circuit.
FYI, I had grand dreams of copying a couple hundred of my old LPs to CD, did a few, and the process was so time consuming (setting EQ, removing noise, separating out tracks, etc.) that I just gave up. I bought CDs of the most important, and have lived without digital versions of the rest.
I should have been clearer. I just don’t think you can pay someone else to make your personal copies, as was suggested in the OP.
Yeah - I wouldn’t do it myself - but I’ve had a few friends who have min steros who’ve had success with sending the output straight from the speaker jacks. What I use is a preamp equalizer on a stereo system, so the sound come out nice.
Some of you may remember DAK. The tutorial is good, even if you don’t buy the deal.
Last I heard, you could legally hire someone else to make a copy for you - I have film transferred to tape (telecine) all the time - perfectly legal (if the transfer shop keeps a copy for themselves, that would be illegal (DMCA)), but taking my legal copy, transferring it to another media, and handing both the original and the copy to me is legal - I am just hiring them to do something I could do legally myself.
and NEVER use speaker terminals for line-in.
and, since the end recording will be no better than the poorest piece of equipment used in its production, stay away from Radio Shack. (IMHO, of course)
There is another option. You can avoid the hassles of using a PC alltogether.
You can use this.
Of course, you’ll also need a source and an amp/preamp with a phono section (and a rec output). But the whole process should be about as easy as recording a tape.
Just make sure that:
a) you buy “music CD-R’s” (a format slightly different from computer CD-R’s, their price includes a RIAA tax). Available most everywhere. CD recorders are usually designed to use “music CD-R” media.
and
b) while you record music (just like on a tape deck,) NEVER let the signal raise above 0dB. Avoid getting the volume “in the red” at any cost. Digital clipping/distortion is a lot nastier than tape clipping.
Hope this helps.
For anyone with a computer hooked up to an amplifier hooked up to a turntable, try what I do, and use Audiograbber. It’s free. Choose Line In from the menu.
I’ll just echo what others have said, the costs are going to be too high. I’ve done several of these projects for people in the past and I charge them my standard studio rate -$48 per hour. A average album would take a couple of hours.
In the cases where I did this, the music was specialty recordings, very old or rare, or cassette to CD convertions.
Most cases, if you’re just looking for the music to have on CD, just buy the CD. If you want to do it yourself, Extraneous laid out the basic format for it above.