Downloaded but wouldn’t open. And gave me a message to the effect that I was being protected against myself.
Did you do this part?
If you already did that, do it again and tell me exactly what the dialog box says.
Not yet. My wife pretty much monopolizes that computer, so I have wait for her to take a break.
Another Audacity user here. I’ve been using it for years to rip my vinyl. I actually have it on two laptops, one Windows 10 and other Ubuntu. The Ubuntu laptop is the one where I do most of my ripping. One problem I have with it is that if I enable the monitoring so I can hear while it is recording, then after a few minutes it just “flatlines” and nothing records. So I just record without monitoring and have to keep an eye on when the album side is over.
What I do is record an entire album as one Audacity project. Start recording, then start the turntable. When the side is over, pause Audacity, flip the album over, resume recording. When the second side is done, stop Audacity and save the project.
To split into individual tracks, I first select the entire project, then go into Effects - Click Removal to remove any clicks and pops. It’s not perfect, but I don’t expect a copy of an album to sound as flawless as a CD anyway. Then I go to the start of the project and remove everything from the beginning up to about half a second before the music starts. Then I find the end of the track, select from that point back to the beginning, then do File - Export Selected. I give it a file name like “01 (track name).mp3” and then it comes up with the dialog to enter the MP3 tags. When the track has been exported, then I delete the selection so that the next track starts where the first one left off. Repeat until all tracks have been saved. Then I close the Audacity project but DO NOT save changes, which leaves me with my original Audacity project intact.
I’m bookmarking this for when I have more time. Right now, my usual move is to think about an old album that I loved, think about the time it would take to haul out the old turntable and many cables (old AR, no USB), so I could listen to it on my computer or phone, then recall that my LP is full of scratches…
…annnd, I just download the album instead.
(Then I’ve got it on my phone in less than a minute, usually thinking “Whoa, were those grace notes there in the original? And the maracas? This sounds great…”)
Y’know, we have so many freakin’ albums that the thought of sitting there day after day to digitize them depresses me. I’m going to check on iTunes and see if any of them are available already for download. Some are fairly obscure jazz albums, but maybe. . .
When I first saw this topic, my urge was to reply that the biggest hint for ripping LPs is to check whether someone has already done it. And, if it was a legitimate operator, they may have used a laser turntable and fancy noise removal software and other tools that, face it, you were never going to have at home.
I mentioned in another thread that I really want a butler (preferably named Jeeves or Bunter or Catherwood, but that’d be optional). Well, here’s another task for him!
“M’Lord, I have completed the ‘digitalising’ of Mister Coltrane’s live albums. Would you like me to move on to his studio work, or would you prefer a wee dram and a cucumber sandwich instead?”
If I don’t have the budget for some serious butling, maybe I could get an intern (maybe from a tech college’s music program, or an audio mixing class).
.
ETA: Seriously, tasks like this are on my “to do when I retire” list. The only little problem is that I retired years ago, and I still won’t make time to do time-intensive, repetitive work like this…
I enjoy this process for my Seeburg 1000 collection for two important reasons…
First and foremost, these records are not available anywhere in digitized form and there is no concept of song listings available. Each record is a new experience, with 20 tracks per side of ??? who knows what. It’s fun to hear them for the first time in 40 years and listen to arrangements of old show tunes or bouncy arrangements of early 70s pop.
Second, I have a passion for finding an even better way to do things. I currently have a small MIDI control panel with buttons and switches and knobs that I have programmed via fancy macros to handle most of the Audacity work. With all these macros It takes me approximately 3 minutes to go through one side of a record, generating ~20 properly tagged MP3 files, as long as the record is in good condition…
Well, I finally had success using Audacity. I just did a bare bones recording of an album and exported it without dividing the tracks or doing any click removal, etc. Since I no longer have a component sound system, any imperfections will likely go unheard on the Sonos, and my wife really took good care of her albums. There’s been good help in this thread, especially with links to tutorials, so thank you all.
Wait, so you’re done with it now? A large file of several connected tracks, with clicks? I bet you’ll want to divide the tracks and clean them up…
Perhaps, but there are a lot of albums to record, and the chances of us actually listening to most of them is fairly slim.
Oh, so this is a kind of archive? Got it. Then it sounds smart to leave the tweaking for the future, in case you suddenly declare “Damn, I really need to hear Thelonius At The Bolognius, Summer o’ Fitty-Two. Honey, wher’zat hard drive?”
But if you never say that, you at least know the music’s at least saved, jussst in case…
(I got as far as digitizing one bigass hard drive full of ‘old’ music ('59-'76) a decade ago and… I’ve never once hauled it out and plugged it in. I keep finding new music I like and just don’t have time to dig through the old stuff.)
Exactly. I did clip off the intro noise on the latest album of Bob Marley songs. I hit “record” too soon and picked up all that noise. That’s about as far as I’m willing to go at this point.