Ripping and cleaning old vinyl records

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m (very slowly) converting a ton of old records (the list of albums that start with “C” that need to be converted is like…30 or so. And “D” is going to be as bad–I’ve already done about 30 between “A” and “B”) and while I’m getting good results, I thought I’d:
A) share my methods and (more importantly)
B) see if anyone else has any tips

My methods largely come from a post I found on the usenet from someone who’s handle is “Mr Hyde”. His method has some…unusual steps that result in weird sounding outputs, but it was a great starting ground (if anyone cares, I can repost what he wrote. It’s not copyrighted–he’s got some interesting ideas, even if I don’t use all of them).

My method-- (keeping in mind that my goal is to NOT remix or improve the sound. Excluding vinyl defects like clicks and hiss, I want the result to sound as close to what a virgin copy of the album would sound like as possible) is:

  1. Use canned compressed air (like for a computer) to blow dust off the record.

  2. Wipe record down with a felt record cleaning dealie (dry first, then wet)—BTW, does anyone have a recipe for the “record cleaning liquid” that you can buy? It’s getting gawdawful expensive. I think it’s mostly isopropyl alcohol (sp), but I’m not positive.

  3. Rip the album (via stereo-based CD burner—I’ve tried going directly to the computer but the stereo based stand alone unit simply gives considerably better results) in two tracks, one per side, making sure to record the silent area before track one (see further down for why)

  4. Using Exact Audio Copy, rip the CD as an uncompressed WAV file.

  5. Open a track (side) in Cool Edit Pro (It’s now “Adobe Audition”)

  6. Clip out the “needle lifts” noise at the front and back.

  7. Use the built in function “Click/Pop eliminator”->“Fill single click now” to get rid of the really obvious huge pops.

  8. At this point, Mr Hyde’s methods come into play…this step results in tremendous improvement.

a) Go to the beginning of the WAV. Do a BIG closeup until you can find exactly where the music starts. Generally, it’s easy to see.

b) From there, go back between .550 and .555 seconds (per Mr. Hyde, this equals about one rotation of an album at 33 1/3d rpms.)

c) From .550 seconds before the music starts, highlight everything before that, and delete, so the start of the WAV is .550-.555 seconds before the music. Highlight that .550-.555 seconds. (He talks about “cyclic redundancy of the turntable” here and goes over my head. )

d) (His words in quotes) Go to Transform/Noise Reduction->Noise Reduction and “check that the following parameters are in place: FFT Size = 8192, Remove Noise is checked, Precision Factor = 7, Smoothing Amount = 5, Transition Width = -5db and the Noise Reduction Level slider is at 85%.” (I dunno why those numbers exactly, but they produce great results, so I’m not arguing :smiley: ) then click "Get Profile From Sample " and then hit “Close” (you can’t just X out or it won’t keep the noise profile.)

e) Highlight the entire WAV and then go back to Transform/Noise Reduction->Noise Reduction and simply hit “OK”. It takes about 7-10 minutes for the routine to run, but when it finishes, it’ll have removed almost all turntable rumbles and noises. If you look, you’ll see that the gaps between tracks become almost flat with dead silence and it removes no actual content that I’ve ever been able to discern!

  1. Next, get rid of clicks and pops–The “Click/Pop remover” tool that comes with Cool Edit sucks. It’s fine for single clicks, but to clean up one side of an album can take, literally, 4-6 hours to run with iffy results. Hyde recommends (and so do I) Jeffery Klein’s “ClickFix”. It’s cheap, it produces far better results than the built-in one, and it’s fast, taking only minutes to run. (At this point I deviate completely from Mr. Hyde’s recommendations*)

ClickFix comes with generic settings, and I usually use the “33 1/3d, Normal” setting. One important step–There’s a button that says “Keep only clicks”. Use it to preview! If you hear any content, choose “33 1/3d, Gentle” or tweak the settings yourself. You don’t want to remove content! :slight_smile: Make sure you UNCHECK the “Keep only clicks” before actually processing the file!!!

  1. Cut the WAV file into tracks (which is easy, since after step 8 you can now see exactly where the track gaps are, by highlighting 'em and using File-Save Selection. I save 'em as WAVs.

  2. Choose File/Close All Waveforms and Sessions. Then open the other side of the album. You have to do step 8 all over again (the noise is different on each side for some reason) but you can just use whatever settings you chose for step 9 again.

  3. For me, since I want to save archival copies, I use Monkey’s Audio since it’s a lossless compression to compress the files to about half their size using the Compression, Insane setting on Monkey’s Audio (this can take about 15 minutes to 20 minutes for an album).

  4. I use MP3Tag to tag the resultant APE files.

  5. If I want to then make MP3 copies of some or all tracks, I use dBpowerAmp and LAME 3.92 (seems more stable than later versions).

  6. I then burn the APE files to a DVD for archiving and the MP3s to a CD or copy to a portable MP3 player.

So, anyone have any comments? Suggestions? Recommendations?

Fenris

*Mr Hyde suggests saving the WAV file before starting the declicking. Then, don’t uncheck the “Keep only clicks” and processing. What you get is a WAV file with nothing but clicks and pops. He then says to chose Transform/Invert. Then Edit and and “Mix paste overlap” over the original WAV file. The idea is that the anti-noise from the inverted waveform will cancel out the uninverted noise and you’ll get better results. This hasn’t been my experience.

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How interesting that you should post on this topic… this is part of what I do for a living. I’ve restored hundreds of records of my own, and also for broadcast and CD reissue by major labels. I use Cool Edit 2000 exclusively. No external plugins, no other noise/click removal software, they’re all various shades of terrible. I’ve got CDs of records that you can’t tell were sourced from vinyl.

For starters, unless you want to buy one of those $800 vacuum chamber record cleaners, don’t even worry about putting liquid on the surface of your records. If you haven’t been using them for coasters or dinner plates, they are not dirty. Dusty, yes. Tap water leaves a mineral residue in the grooves. Alcohol leeches the pliable properties out of the vinyl, leaves a white film residue and ruins your records permanently. Get a record brush. I have two different ones by Audio Technica. One for albums, one for singles, although they are both useful for both kinds of record. Start by placing the record on top of a soft cloth on the table or desk (not on the turntable), then begin combing the dust out of the grooves. Sweep it up in a line, then sweep the whole line off. Wipe off the brush. Repeat these steps, rotating the record, until lines of dust stop coming up. This may take awhile, but it’s worth all of your effort.

I don’t understand anything about your reasoning for not recording a wav file directly onto the computer. All that stuff about recording it on a CD and extracting the CD onto the computer is a lot of unnecessary work. You need to have your stereo connected to your computer. Take a line out from the tape record outputs on your receiver/integrated amp/what-have-you, into the Line In on the sound card. If you’re using CEP/Audition, create a new wave file, 44,100 Hz stereo, 32-bit. Adjust the record level of your line input so that the waveforms do not approach the upper/lower reaches of the screen. We’ll deal with loudness later. Better to work with a lower level than one too high, which you can’t fix later. Your peaks should go no higher than -6 dB on the meters.

Record your album or single from the outer edge to the locking groove at the end. The processing time for an album would be ridiculously long, so feel free to record albums one song at a time, and process them individually. You do need to have the empty vinyl between tracks, and save it for getting a noise profile. Once you have your wave file, delete everything up to just after you dropped the needle, and everything just before the needle hit the locking groove (or next track), title it and save it. The first thing you want to do is go to Scientific Filters and do a High Pass filter, cutting off everything below 40 Hz. Cutoff 40 Hz, Order 6, Master Gain 0. You’ll notice that the shape of your waveform changes. That’s because you’ve just removed all the grunge and subsonic rumbles from it. Next, go to the FFT filter and use the preset to remove 60 Hz + 120 Hz. FFT size 24000. Windowing Function - Blackman. Check Lock To Constant Filter. This removes any AC hum present in your system, and any that was present on the record. If you are working on a record that was recorded in England, go back to FFT Filter and remove 50 Hz + 100 Hz. This removes any hum from the English AC system present in the recording. This procedure has just eliminated the possiblility of sonic artifacts (swirling, burbling noises) from the noise reduction we’re going to do later.

I recommend that you start by using the method at the bottom of your post as your main method of decrackling. If you aren’t getting great results from it, you’ve left out a step. I’ll lay it out in detail for you. It’s called “The Younglove Method”, after a poster on the Syntrillium forums, who came up with it.

I’ll go into that in the next post, so this doesn’t end up being a novel!

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An editing function that is very important to use is Zero Crossings. This means that your edits will occur where the waveform crosses the center line. It makes for clean edits that are undetectable. The default in Audition is Shift H to move left to the first zero crossing, Shift L to move the other side of a highlighted section to the first zero crossing on the right. Highlight the section of lead-in groove up to before the song starts. Hit Shift-H and Shift-L. Go to Edit, and Copy To New. CTRL-Tab back to the other screen with your waveform, go to the end of the song, and from where it fades out completely, highlight that to the end. Repeat the Zero Crossings, then CTRL-C to copy. CTRL-Tab to the previous screen. Put the cursor at the right side of the screen, then CTRL-V to paste the section onto the end. This is your source of noise profile.

Open Noise Reduction. Use these settings: Snapshots in profile: 4096. FFT Size: 24000. Reduce by 40 dB. Precision Factor: 9. Smoothing Amount: 9. Transition Width: 0. Spectral Decay Rate: 65. Click the button for Keep Only Noise. Then click Get Profile From Selection. Save this profile when it’s done, just so it doesn’t go away if you accidentally exit NR. Close that waveform, you don’t need it anymore. CTRL-Tab back to your waveform. Now you can do the manual Declicking procedure with Fill Single Click Now to remove any large scratches. It’s not necessary to go nuts on it, just remove the worst ones. Use the preset for Constant Hiss and Crackle, and use Auto FFT, Pop Oversamples 5, Run Size 8. Find Threshold Levels Only for each scratch you are going to remove. The best way to see these is in Spectral View. You may have to change the settings for Spectral from the default. Go to F4 and click on the Display tab. Under Spectral Display, choose Blackmann-Harris, resolution 256, Window Width 100. You can tell the difference between clicks and snare drum hits, because clicks look uniquely different from them.

When this is done, Save. Next: highlight the whole waveform, go to Edit, and Copy To New. Open NR, apply the noise profile to it, keeping only noise. When this is done, CTRL-C to copy the file into the clipboard. Then open Declicking. Highlight the lead-in groove. Use the preset for Hiss And Lots Of Clicks, hit Auto Find All Levels, and apply that declicking profile to the whole waveform. When it’s done, go to Edit, Mix Paste. Volume: 100. Check Lock Left & Right. Check both Invert boxes. Check Overlap (Mix). Hit OK, and the file with all the scratches is superimposed, 180 degrees out of phase, on top of the same file with the scratches removed, resulting in a click file. CTRL-C this into the clipboard, then CTRL-Tab back to your original waveform, and Mix Paste the click file on top, making sure to first deselect Invert. This is important. Now you have your original waveform, minus any big clicks you removed, and now minus thousands of other clicks which have just been neutralized. Save this.

Now comes the manual declicking. Go to the beginning of the file. Highlight a section of no longer than 3 seconds. 2 is good. Go to Spectral View. Now you must scroll through the waveform, using Page Down on your keyboard, manually removing any clicks leftover, or any bumps from auto-removed clicks. This may take a few minutes, or it may take half an hour, or even more, depending on the shape your record was in. But remember, Younglove has done most of your work for you already. Where it is important to zoom in really close and take out every single aberration is on the fade-out. You must remove as many clicks as humanly possible before you apply noise reduction, or you’ll hear a puff of noise where the NR encountered a click.

Go back to the procedure where you copied the silent parts before and after the song, and create a new file from these. Get a NR profile of this new file, same settings, only click Remove Noise. Go back to the song’s waveform and highlight a section from the beginning to about 20 seconds into the music. Open NR and Preview what the NR sounds like, setting the NR slider first at 80, then going down by 5 each time until it sounds like there’s less background noise, but it doesn’t sound artificial or smothered, and doesn’t “pump and breathe”. When it sounds fine on the beginning, go to the end, highlight the fade and lead-out groove and Preview the NR on that. If, when it fades out, you hear any metallic or swirling sounds, back off on the NR by another 5. When it sounds acceptable, apply the NR to the whole track. You should never have to go lower than 50. Sometimes you can even go above 80, depending on the condition of the vinyl and the thoroughness of the declicking you’ve done. Don’t worry about 100, you’ll never be able to use it.

Now you’re almost done. Give the song a careful listen. If you hear any noises that shouldn’t be there, stop, zoom in, go to Spectral and listen to the passage. You’ll see the offending noise, and you can declick it out. Now that it’s perfect, lop off the lead-in groove, to within a second of the music starting. Then zoom into the beginning of the file and go to Spectral. It’ll be black up to the music, but it may have some coloration as the tape fades up. Highlight from the beginning to the first sound, and go to Amplify, then Fade Up that section, repeatedly if necessary, until you can hit the spacebar to play and hear nothing, then music. Then lop off the quiet part, right before the music starts. Go to the end of the file. Lop off the end after the fade out ends, to within an extra second. Zoom in, listen to the fade. Highlight the whole fadeout, go to Amplify, Fade Out that section. Twice, if necessary, on the last few seconds.

Next, right click over the time display, and select Compact Disc (75 fps). Now, go to Edit and Snapping, and select Snap To Ruler. At the very last sound, place the cursor on the first even amount of minutes and seconds, e.g. 4:32:00. It will go there automatically, because you instructed it to under Snapping. Highlight from there to the end, and delete that. Now you have a declicked, denoised record.

Next, go to F11 and Convert Sample Type to 44100 Hz, Stereo, 16 bit. Now it’s in CD format. Go to Amplify. Click on Center Wave. Check the boxes for DC Bias Adjust to 0 on both channels, Absolute. Deselect View All Settings in dB, if it is checked. Calculate Normalization Levels to (enter this number) 96. Click on Calculate Now, and OK. The wave file is amplified to the same loudness on both channels. Save. Done.

I guarantee you that if you try this method, it will far surpass anything you have done previously. You should have a deadly pristine recording, virtually indistinguishable from a tape or CD playback. If you have any questions, or are unclear on anything, please feel free to ask. I hope I’ve been able to help.

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I have a bunch of old records I’d like to copy to cd. My brother has a set up that is, well, a little more rudimentary that what you all describe, but I have several cd’s that sound, well, like average cassete tape quality. So maybe I should try a little harder. I’m saving this thread and, in a few more years, I’ll come back when I’m all set up.

My brother and I aren’t audiophiles, so we don’t demand perfect clarity, and he’s played around with cleaning up the sound but the huge array of options and controls are bewildering. So he gave up and we get listenable copies with a little hiss and such. One of these days though, I’ll not be so lazy…

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Thanks for the posting! This will really help! I’m going to give it a shot.

In answer to your earlier question, I have two reasons (well, three, technically) for using the stereo based CD burner. First, the stereo is in one room and the computer in another on the other side of the house and the way my house is set up, it wouldn’t be practical to lug my computer into the living room and ditto with the stereo. Second, I’ve simply gotten better results with it. I may not have been doing the ripping correctly or my sound card might be up to snuff, but for me, it’s no big deal (and not a lot of extra steps) to rip the tracks from the CD. An extra 5 or 6 minutes at most. (The third reason is that I’ve already bought it! :smiley: )

The stuff in your first post with the filters to remove AC hum, etc is amazing. I ran it on a couple of files that I’d already done and it really improved things…I can’t really describe the change but it was there! Thanks! :slight_smile:

I do have a few questions about what you wrote, if you don’t mind typing a bit more:

–what version of Cool Edit are you using? Mine doesn’t have a Spectral Decay Rate option.

I didn’t know that those settings affected Fill Single Click!! That’s going to be useful!

–This is going to take some practice. I’m used to looking at the waveform view. I’ve gotten to the point where I have about an 80% chance of being right about clicks vs snare drums.

You lost me here. We have the newly copied waveform…we apply the noise profile to it, keeping only the noise. That part makes sense: We’re then going to invert and paste it. What I don’t get is this: why are we declicking this waveform? Isn’t that going to remove clicks that we’re going to zero out by inverting and pasting? Or do we declick the original waveform?

Also, (I’m in the process of trying this now), should I be hearing audio on the copied waveform after applying “Keep only noise”? I can hear music pretty clearly…if I invert and paste, won’t I be removing content?

Do I want to do this? I’m trying to preserve the LP as closely as possible–wouldn’t normalizing it change what the original sound engineer did?

Thanks again for all the help! It’s really appreciated! :slight_smile:

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When I started out doing this, I couldn’t figure out why I was getting all these metallic, burbly noises and pumping and breathing after doing noise reduction. After reading the (now defunct) Syntrillium forums, I learned a lot about what happens when you change the default parameters in Cool Edit. The settings it comes with out of the box are pretty much useless. I discovered that those sonic artifacts are from low-frequency energy and groove noise. Since records contain little or no useful information below 40 Hz, once you remove everything below it, you’ve just taken away the possibility of the NR not working well enough to remove the noise without affecting the music.

I went with the functions of Audition; I’ve deleted Cool Edit Pro, which doesn’t have that option. S’OK, no matter. Cool Edit 2000 doesn’t have it, either.

Yeah, each scratch and click is different from the last one, so it makes sense to measure it with Find Threshold Levels for each one. This is the reason why it’s impractical to use Joe’s Declicking Software to remove the clicks from a record. No one setting is going to be the right one for all the clicks on any given record. Software that can detect those parameters costs as much as a house! Manual declicking is your best bet.

Once you’ve learned to discern what you’re looking at in Spectral, you’ll use it all the time. It’s incredibly useful, and it will let you see clicks that are undetectable in Waveform view. It’s pretty simple, really: it shows a representation of the color of the intensity of the sound. Black is silent, fading to blue, which is hiss, then into reds and oranges, yellow being the most intense sound. If you zoom in close enough, you’ll see the sound as a series of evenly-spaced pulses. Drum hits are an even distance from each other. Anything that appears as a vertical line between two evenly-spaced drum hits is probably a click. Of course, play it to make sure, but it’s most often the case. So you go through the waveform looking for things that look out of place. You can get so good at it that you can remove peoples’ mouth clicks from when they were singing right up on the microphone with dry mouth! I’ve got the world’s cleanest version of Elvis’ “Love Me Tender.” The difference is extremely subtle - it sounds absolutely normal. When you compare it with the original, then you notice how often he made lip-smacking or other dry-mouth sounds, and you go ugh! You can’t see these sounds unless you’re in Spectral. You can hear them OK, but in Waveform View, they’re so small, you can’t see them.

Let me try to explain it another way. You’ve got the original wave, A. You make a copy, B. You use Keep Only Noise on B to filter out all the musical frequencies, and leave only residual audio and scratches. You copy this into the clipboard, it’s now C, sitting in your RAM. Then you declick B, because it is now unencumbered by musical frequencies and contains the scratches that were hidden by the music. When you invert-mix-paste C on top of B, any residual audio is cancelled out, leaving only a file with clicks, no other sound. Since this file is already inverted, when you mix-paste it on top of A, the clicks are all lined up exactly with each other, however B’s clicks now being 180 degrees out of phase, when you paste them on A, they cancel out the clicks that are on A. Poof! Gone! Does that explain it any better?

You’ll hear some fuzzy-sounding audio on B after you run Keep Only Noise, but after you declick it and paste C onto it, that audio will be cancelled out. This is why we make a copy of the waveform to do the processing on, so no actual content is removed. All the removing takes place on the copy. This would properly be called Noise Cancellation, rather than reduction. It relies on the principle of phase cancellation.

You could record a whole side, remove the biggest scratches, and then normalize the whole side to 96. Then, any songs that are lower than that level on purpose will stay that way. Then you have preserved, how shall we say, the structural integrity of the recordings. Then you could copy to new each song on the side, process it individually and make a new folder for each processed song, then at the end of your work, put them on a CD with :03 spaces between tracks. There is no way to accurately know what the original engineer did. His levels changed between the multitrack tape machine and the mastering machine, and between there and the record lathe. The record may be cut louder or softer, depending on the content and length of each side. In digital, you don’t have to worry about that stuff. If you extract any CD on the charts today, none of them have any dynamic range at all, they’re a solid waveform from start to finish. This is called Brickwall Limiting, and it’s the worst innovation in music recording to happen in my lifetime. So don’t worry about normalizing a song in which you have not altered its dynamics.

You’re welcome. I’ll still be around if you have more questions. There are other tips and tricks I can tell you about, after you’ve done this a few times and got a feel for it.

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One other question–I’ve got a record that won’t quite clean up–it’s got a low-level crackle…only it’s not quite a crackle…it sounds like someone was very quietly crumpling a piece of paper or cellophane at the furthest corner from the microphone in the studio, if that makes any sense…or, to describe it another way, as though the microphone picked up a steady rainfall…it’s just above the threshold where it’s audible and almost impossible to hear…until you notice it. And then it drives you nuts.

Any suggestions for cleaning that up?

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Fenris, This is 100% off topic, but I wanted to mention that I haven’t seen you around the place much of late, and it is good to see ya!

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Well, I’ve encountered a handful of records that refuse to be restored, because they were in such poor shape. If, after running the Younglove Method on it and then the manual declicking, you can still hear that crackling noise, you may be out of luck for being able to do much more to remove it. NR won’t fix it, because it’s strictly a crackling problem. You could scroll through it in Spectral, .5 second at a time and take out each noise (I’ve done this) and decide to live with the results. Or you could alternately try to find another copy of the record on the net. Sometimes this is your only option.

I did want to add this information, which I left out twice. The reason why I suggested that you record directly to the computer is because the best results will be obtained by recording in 32-bit. This adds 16 extra bits to the depth of your digital recording. When you process the file in 32-bit, some of those bits are going to be truncated. This is not a problem, because at the end, when you downsample to 16-bit, you will still have all of the original bits contained in the digital recording. If you start working on a 16-bit file, as you are doing, and removing noise and whatnot from it, some of those bits are going to be truncated, and you’ll never get them back.

Perhaps you could look into getting a standalone phono preamp, and taking your turntable to the room where your computer is. Set it up nearby and plug the preamp into the sound card. Would that work for you?

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So deep… in vinyl geekness, can’t see surface… must breath! Ahhh… that’s better! :wink:

I’m going to send this great thread to my 17 year old daughter “The Cartridge Queen”. Against my advice about the evils of vinyl, she persists in her love affair with vinyl and record playing technology. Her entire paycheck goes to support her vinyl habit and turntable hardware. Lately she’'s taken to getting some classical records from thrifts, and she says “The music is beautiful, but the sound is terrible”, and asked me if I knew of a pop and tick removal method. She didn’t particularly like the hammer and blowtorch suggestion, so this thread will be very useful.

Thanks!

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You’re quite welcome! I’ve bought hundreds of records at thrift stores. Please suggest to your daughter that she buy only the ones that look like someone has kept it in the sleeve and not put their grimy fingerprints all over them. If she finds an LP that she really wants to have, but its condition is terrible, she may be able to find it at gemm.com - which is the largest repository of collectors and sellers of vinyl on the whole internet. Please give her my regards, and tell her that lots of people still think that records and turntables are the coolest thing ever.

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Quick question: there are four choices here, all of which have a “High Pass” option-
Bessel, Butterworth, Chebychev1 and Chebychev2. Which should I use for this step. Does it matter?

I’m going to try your method, start to finish on that disk with the crackle and see what happens…the only change I’m going to have to make is that I’ll have to treat each side as a single track as there’s applause where the track gaps should be, so I don’t have an silence to work except at either end.

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I can’t remember why, but mine is set on Butterworth. There must have been a reason, but I’ve been doing it so long with the same settings (because they work!) that I haven’t considered changing anything.

Here’s a tip that’ll work nicely, which will allow you to work on each track individually. First, take a section from the lead-in and lead-out grooves for your noise profile. If you’ve right clicked on the time display and set it to Compact Disc (75 fps), with your whole side open in Waveform view, do this:
At some point in the midst of the applause between songs, zoom in and place the cursor in whatever spot you like. Do the right-side Zero Crossing, to shift the end of the selection outward to the first zero crossing on the right. Then left click and drag the highlight function to the left, to highlight that whole song. Go to Edit/Copy To New. It makes a new copy of that song. Title and save it. CTRL-Tab back to the big waveform with that song highlighted. Delete it. Repeat this for the rest of the songs, until you have the whole side broken up into tracks. Delete the original side-long wave file, you don’t need it now. Process the tracks individually. Do not change the length of any track. From Track 2 to the beginning of the last song, your file will start and end in the middle of applause. When you’re finished, burn the tracks to CD in order, in Disc At Once mode, and they will all be rejoined on zero crossings, at the proper CD format sector boundaries. This will make a seamless transition from one song to the next, without a gap or click. Only the track number changes. Cool, huh?

14

Very cool, but I think it’d be much easier to process the whole file in a lump and then track it out like you described. Any reason not to?

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Not really, just a bit less time consuming. If you’ve got less than a P4, 1 GB CPU, it’s gonna take all day to do a side, just waiting for the processes to finish. Saving the Undo data will take so long you could go out for lunch and come back and it still wouldn’t be done!

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Oops, I meant 1 GHz CPU…

17

Holy cow…

I’m partway through and I’ve done a few tweaks but there’s a HUGE improvement using your method!

I’m up to the paragraph that starts with “Now comes the manual declicking”. I did the Younglove method and it removed the vast majority of clicks (remember, this record is in so-so shape…and I can’t find another copy) but there was still a ton of very, very light clicks-I ran it through that Jeffrey Klein Click/fix on the lightest setting and it polished it up perfectly!

Apparently my machine is fast enough–the longest process so far only took about 10 minutes to run for an entire album side.

I still have to do the manual declick, plus there’s what sounds like a very mild tape-hiss left over from somewhere that I need to get rid of but so far it sounds fantstic.

I think what I’m going to do is use your method for the albums I really care about and use a modified version of my earlier method (which is much quicker) combined with a bunch of the techniques you’ve listed for the stuff I’m just archiving.

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So, Fenris, you’ll have to let the currently 200+ of us who read this thread know how it went with your album restoration!

Out of curiosity, what album is it that you’re working on? You mentioned that you couldn’t find another copy. I’ve got 12,000 records. It has taken me up to 38 years to find an all-but-impossible rarity, but I found it on the web. Maybe I’ve got your LP, who knows? Maybe I could find you another one…

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The album is “Song and Dance”–it’s a musical by Andrew Lloyd-Webber. There’s about 6 casts of it and the one that’s impossible to find is the one starring Sarah Brightman. It’s not actually all that rare, I’ve seen it on eBay once or twice, but it’s not common (and Gemm doesn’t have it).

The restoration of side two (I recorded the second side first…oops! :stuck_out_tongue: ) was near flawless. It’s not perfect, but it’s close enough. I’ll let you know how side one goes.

Thanks again for the advice and help! :slight_smile:

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I’ve never tried it with Vinyl, but I’ve captured other audio sources with Audacity, which also contains the necessary tools to clean up, edit, trim, tag and export as MP3. There’s also an option to chenge speed which knows all about vinyl RPMs, so in theory, at least, you could speed up the process by capturing at 78 RPM (assuming your turntable supports it), then slow down the captured sample within the editor. You’d have to use a higher sampling rate and, in practice, I suspect it might make the music sound odd, as you’re shifting all the frequencies way up, some of them potentially beyond the response capabilities of the preamp stages, so there is likely to be actual loss that way.

However, I’d still recommend Audacity as a good capture/editing solution for normal use.