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Topic: How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive (Read 9737 times) previous topic - next topic
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How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Trying to find a "how to" that specifies step by step process to record vinyl record to hard drive and then convert to mp3.  I am trying to do this with EAC (exact audio Copy).  I found a great tutorial on how to rip from CD using LAME or Monkeys Audio.  I am confused about exactly what to do when starting with an LP.

Any links or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Gene

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #2 –
When I started a few years ago, I must have run across a hundred different sites giving basic advice. They can't have all disappeared.

http://www.delback.co.uk/lp-cdr.htm

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #4 –
Quote from: HotshotGG on
Quote
Trying to find a "how to" that specifies step by step process to record vinyl record to hard drive


http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti..._Posts_and_FAQs

you could start here.


Thanks for the link!  I was looking for EAC specific links, but now realize that EAC is a great program for ripping cd's but not necessarily for recording LPs.

I am still checking out different programs to record lps.  I have Nero 7 but when I create a wav file, I can not play it in musicmatch.  The properties indicate that it is a wav file.  It opens fine with nero but I dont want to create wav files that only open with nero.  Any idea what is wrong?

Sorry for the delayed response, but I dont get much time for the computer lately.

Thanks,
Gene

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #5 –
Quote from: AndyH-ha on
When I started a few years ago, I must have run across a hundred different sites giving basic advice. They can't have all disappeared.

http://www.delback.co.uk/lp-cdr.htm



Thank you for the link.  I checked it out as well as others.  I at first was trying to get specific instructions on how to use EAC to record LPs, but now realize that EAC is best suited for ripping CD's. 

I am trying to find a good program under $40.00 that can effectively handle filtering of noise, clicking ect.  There are several out there and they all look very similar.  I purchased Nero 7 Utra Edition and it seems to handle wav file filtering pretty good, but when I save the file after applying the filters, it no longer can be opened by MusicMatch.

Are you aware of any programs that would do a better job than Nero in making "clean" recordings from LP?
Thanks again for your feedback and sorry for the delayed response.

Gene

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #6 –
WaveRepair, the program associated with those instructions I linked to, does a very good job of both recording and cleaning up LP input. It is probably the best you can get for the amount of money you want to spend.
http://www.delback.co.uk/wavrep/

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #7 –
In a nutshell:
• You have to connect the turntable to the sound card via your stereo amplifier. RCA cables out of the amp to a plug that matches the Line In on your sound card.
• You capture the sound either as one big wav file for the whole side and then split them later, or record each track separately.
• Process the wavs to clean them up.
• Rip them to MP3 or your codec of choice.

You can capture WAVs with EAC using the Tools, Record Wav option. You can also capture them with CDex. A good freeware editor is Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net). You could use either EAC or CDex to rip the finished wavs to MP3.

You may have to mess around with the Sound Settings in Windows (sometimes the Line In will be muted by default, that sort of thing). Unless your vinyl is very clean, expect to spend lots of time playing with the editor. Keep a copy of the original wav and edit with a copy. If you're incredibly anal about removing ticks and pops, you can spend ages cleaning it up. Personally, I can live with a little bit of noise. You can easily over-process a file and make it mud. Have fun!

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #8 –
Quote from: grod49 on
I am trying to find a good program under $40.00 that can effectively handle filtering of noise, clicking ect.  There are several out there and they all look very similar.

You've already had a number of useful responses, so I won't replicate them. I will just point out that the most important step in transferring LP to digital is the initial analogue playback. The LPs need to be as clean as you can get them, and the turntable/arm/cartridge need to be in good condition and set up correctly. No amount of digital post-processing can make up for deficiencies at this stage.

Recording to hard disk is straightforward, and can be done with free software (Audacity, Wave Repair in "freeware mode", EAC's recording function, etc). Trimming unwanted bits and fading can be done with Audacity, which is an excellent audio editor.

But if you want to do *restoration*, I'm not aware of any free options - you'll have to spend a bit of money. I thank Andy for mentioning Wave Repair. Other inexpensive restoration software I recommend you try out would be Wave Corrector (I consider it to be probably the best affordable automatic declicker at present), Groove Mechanic, and Click Repair. For lots more money, Adobe Audition does a fine job, as does Sony's Noise Reduction 2.0 DX plug-in in combination with a suitable DX-compatible editor (eg. Sound Forge).

Finally, be prepared for a fairly hefty learning curve. Vinyl restoration takes time and judgement, and the more experience you get the better (and faster) you can do it.

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #9 –
Quote from: grod49 on
I have Nero 7 but when I create a wav file, I can not play it in musicmatch.


Make sure you are saving to 16 bit WAV and not 32 bit WAV.

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #10 –
Quote from: odious_m on
Quote from: grod49 on
I have Nero 7 but when I create a wav file, I can not play it in musicmatch.


Make sure you are saving to 16 bit WAV and not 32 bit WAV.



I looked at the properties and it shows 16 bit as the audio sample size.  I read something about deleting a small section of the file to see if it was a header problem.  I tried that and that did not work either.  Thank you for the suggestion anyway!

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #11 –
Quote from: AndyH-ha on
WaveRepair, the program associated with those instructions I linked to, does a very good job of both recording and cleaning up LP input. It is probably the best you can get for the amount of money you want to spend.
http://www.delback.co.uk/wavrep/



Well, if I were to spend up to $100.00, would you still reccommend WaveRepair?  I am concerned with noise, not all the special effects like reverb, etc. 

Thanks,
gene

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #12 –
Quote from: cliveb on
Quote from: grod49 on

I am trying to find a good program under $40.00 that can effectively handle filtering of noise, clicking ect.  There are several out there and they all look very similar.

You've already had a number of useful responses, so I won't replicate them. I will just point out that the most important step in transferring LP to digital is the initial analogue playback. The LPs need to be as clean as you can get them, and the turntable/arm/cartridge need to be in good condition and set up correctly. No amount of digital post-processing can make up for deficiencies at this stage.

Recording to hard disk is straightforward, and can be done with free software (Audacity, Wave Repair in "freeware mode", EAC's recording function, etc). Trimming unwanted bits and fading can be done with Audacity, which is an excellent audio editor.

But if you want to do *restoration*, I'm not aware of any free options - you'll have to spend a bit of money. I thank Andy for mentioning Wave Repair. Other inexpensive restoration software I recommend you try out would be Wave Corrector (I consider it to be probably the best affordable automatic declicker at present), Groove Mechanic, and Click Repair. For lots more money, Adobe Audition does a fine job, as does Sony's Noise Reduction 2.0 DX plug-in in combination with a suitable DX-compatible editor (eg. Sound Forge).

Finally, be prepared for a fairly hefty learning curve. Vinyl restoration takes time and judgement, and the more experience you get the better (and faster) you can do it.


I have made a trial recording of an album and it sounds pretty good to my old ears! Of, course there is the issue of snap, crackle, and pop that I am trying to solve.  Are you saying that "Wave Corrector" would be better for a beginner than "Wave Repair" for restoration purposes?

Hefty learning curve is right!  I have spend hours on just one album and fully realize that at 58 I would die before I finished recording all my albums    I did find myself trying to get every last click out of the one song I was working on, but am ready to give up on that!

I did not clean the vinyl with anything other than a soft lint free cloth.  Someone mentioned using distilled water for cleaning purposes.  Is there a preferred cleaning process?

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #13 –
Quote from: 56Nomad on
In a nutshell:
• You have to connect the turntable to the sound card via your stereo amplifier. RCA cables out of the amp to a plug that matches the Line In on your sound card.
• You capture the sound either as one big wav file for the whole side and then split them later, or record each track separately.
• Process the wavs to clean them up.
• Rip them to MP3 or your codec of choice.

You can capture WAVs with EAC using the Tools, Record Wav option. You can also capture them with CDex. A good freeware editor is Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net). You could use either EAC or CDex to rip the finished wavs to MP3.

You may have to mess around with the Sound Settings in Windows (sometimes the Line In will be muted by default, that sort of thing). Unless your vinyl is very clean, expect to spend lots of time playing with the editor. Keep a copy of the original wav and edit with a copy. If you're incredibly anal about removing ticks and pops, you can spend ages cleaning it up. Personally, I can live with a little bit of noise. You can easily over-process a file and make it mud. Have fun!


Wow! This wonderful to find so many people willing to help out a nubie!  I have been capturing wav files with EAC and the problem I am having is trying to figure out which editor to use for getting rid of the snap, crackle and pop without turning the file into "mud" as you stated.  I started with EAC and it worked pretty good but left a some noise uncorrected.  I then tried Nero Wave Editor 3, which sounded pretty darn good but when I tried to load the edited wav file into my MusicMatch player, it would not load.  I can open the file with Nero Show Time, but I want to be able to open the Wave file with any player, or Cd player.  It is a shame to have a purchased wave editor and not be able to use it, but Nero support is not very good.

So, I have some homework to do with all the suggested editors.  Thank you for the tip to work only on copies of the wav files!  I did not think of that when I was doing my testing and messed up my recording and have to start all over again with the recording.

Thanks again,
gene

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #14 –
I believe cleaning with water isn't the best of ideas because when it dries it can stick small particles like dust to the plastic that were loose before.

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #15 –
Quote from: tgoose on
I believe cleaning with water isn't the best of ideas because when it dries it can stick small particles like dust to the plastic that were loose before.


So should I just vacum the record before recording or is there a recommended solution to apply?  I have seen stuff advertised on the internet but have not seen anyone saying they used it.

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #16 –
I have two wooden brushes, and stylus cleaner, and some fluid (which by this late the is probably totally inert) by a company called DiscWasher, who made their mark with a stylus cleaner, a record-cleaner brush, and some hopefully harmless cleaning fluids.  Gets a lot of junk off of dusty or dirty records and styluses.  IIRC, after records went out of vogue, DiscWasher started pushing snake-oil junk (to include colored rings that you stick on CDs), and now I don't see them around anymore.  Got what they deserved.  For what it's worth.

A few ounces of fluid can last for years.

My gut reaction is that DISTILLED water, as one poster said above, and a carefully chosen cloth or brush that won't scratch the records, should be fine.  Whatever you use, brush or wipe parellel with the grooves (the opposite of what you should do with CDs).

Quote from: grod49 on
Quote from: tgoose on

I believe cleaning with water isn't the best of ideas because when it dries it can stick small particles like dust to the plastic that were loose before.


So should I just vacum the record before recording or is there a recommended solution to apply?  I have seen stuff advertised on the internet but have not seen anyone saying they used it.

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #17 –
Cleaning properly can make a significant difference in your starting point when you go to remove the clicks, pops, and background noise from your LP recording. There have been many threads on cleaning techniques and cleaning solutions, some, I'm sure, on this forum. For a description of a very good basic technique, there is a page on this site
http://discdoc.com/
While oriented towards selling those particular products, the technique works quite well with many less expensive solutions and brushes.

Vacuuming, to remove fluids, is very good but definitely don't dry vacuum. Also, you need a proper LP to vacuum cleaner interface. There are several that work but none come standard with any home vacuum cleaner.

WaveRepair is quite labor intensive. I doubt it is possible to find another program that can give you better results -- if you are willing to put in the time and effort to use it properly -- but other programs can produce good results with less work. Those I work with, and thus the ones I know, are more expensive than your indicated budget. I can't say whether decent results are possible with those whose prices are in between WaveRepair and my own choices.

A standard working technique is to save every major change, when cleaning and repairing, with a new name so that you can go back a step anytime you need to.

If you become interested enough to continue with this practice, you will find that processing an album will eventually take less time, but a fac tor of probably several hundred percent or more, once you become familiar enough with what and how to.

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #18 –
i dont know how safe this is and have never tried it on my own records but i have a friend who never plays his vinyl once he has got a good rip and last time i spoke to him about his rips he said he was using canned air (the stuff used to clean inside pc's) to clean them with good results. anyone else tried this? it seemed a bit insane to me but maybe he is onto something.

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #19 –
Quote from: AndyH-ha on
Vacuuming, to remove fluids, is very good but definitely don't dry vacuum. Also, you need a proper LP to vacuum cleaner interface. There are several that work but none come standard with any home vacuum cleaner.

I will second the recommendation for proper vacuum cleaning as the best method. I experimented for a while in trying to build my own using an old turntable I bought in a junk shop, but in the end shelled out for a commercial design (a Moth RCM Mk2). Other well-known vacuum cleaners are the VPI and Nitty-Gritty devices. The Keith Monks is probably the best of the bunch, but it costs thousands.

Quote from: AndyH-ha on
WaveRepair is quite labor intensive. I doubt it is possible to find another program that can give you better results -- if you are willing to put in the time and effort to use it properly -- but other programs can produce good results with less work.

Andy has summed up Wave Repair pretty well. It is fundamentally a special-purpose WAV editor that has a number of editing features specifically aimed at fixing the type of defects found on vinyl records. It it very *unlike* most other restoration packages, which typically aim to do things automatically. It doesn't include the type of effects that you find in general purpose editors - only the ones needed for vinyl restorations.

As a general rule, automatic restoration has the very significant advantage of requiring far less effort on the part of the user, but there are three basic disadvantages:
(i) some damage will be missed. You can then use another editor to address this.
(ii) some non-damage will be "fixed". This is a major bummer; you need to use these tools with a "light touch" to avoid this kind of problem. For example, brass and reed instruments such as trumpet/sax/etc are routinely trashed by over-zealous declicking.
(iii) some genuine damage will be changed but not fixed. Most commonly, big clicks and pops are replaced by thuds and splats, which are usually harder to track down manually than the original click/pop. If you plan to run an automatic declicker, it's generally a good idea to manually remove big clicks/pops first to avoid this scenario.

I've never found an automatic declicker that can fix low-frequency thumps caused by things such as "vinyl pimples" or "fast warps".

grod49 asked if Wave Corrector would be easier to use than Wave Repair for a beginner. The answer is that for automatic declicking, Wave Corrector is easier to use regardless of the experience of the user. I sometimes use it myself. One nice aspect of Wave Corrector is that is allows you to review each detected click and tell it whether or not to actually fix it. Very few declickers have this option. (As it happens, Wave Repair does, but I am happy to acknowledge that Wave Repair's automatic declicking is not as good as Wave Corrector's).

In summary, all I can suggest is that you download as many restoration packages as you can and try them out before making any buying decisions. If there is no evaluation version available, be suspicious: what have they got to hide? You wouldn't buy a car without a test drive, so don't do it with restoration software. It's unlikely that you'll find one single program that will do everything you need - even though I wrote Wave Repair and therefore know it inside out, I sometimes crank up various other programs when I have specific tasks to perform.

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #20 –
Someone will likely crucify me and tell me I'm an idiot for this but...

The vast majority of record cleaners use isopropyl alcohol as the main cleaning solution. I have a can of electrical contact cleaner which is basically isopropyl alcohol. I spray it on my record-cleaning brush (one of those el-cheapo things) and give the records a wipe while they spin. It removes fingerprints, spilled booze, all sorts of nasty crud. Dries (evaporates) in seconds, too. Then I give the records another spin and wipe them with a dry brush, a carbon-fiber thing. Between the two, they look pristine to the eye and my stylus always looks clean after playing the record. Maybe in 2 years I'll find out I ruined my vinyl, but it cleans them like a charm, and now I have them on CD. Your mileage may vary.

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #21 –
Quote from: 56Nomad on
Someone will likely crucify me and tell me I'm an idiot for this but...

The vast majority of record cleaners use isopropyl alcohol as the main cleaning solution. I have a can of electrical contact cleaner which is basically isopropyl alcohol. I spray it on my record-cleaning brush (one of those el-cheapo things) and give the records a wipe while they spin. It removes fingerprints, spilled booze, all sorts of nasty crud. Dries (evaporates) in seconds, too. Then I give the records another spin and wipe them with a dry brush, a carbon-fiber thing. Between the two, they look pristine to the eye and my stylus always looks clean after playing the record. Maybe in 2 years I'll find out I ruined my vinyl, but it cleans them like a charm, and now I have them on CD. Your mileage may vary.

A few points:

1. Excessive/repeated use of isopropyl alcohol on vinyl LPs is not a good idea. IPA can leech the plasticisers from the vinyl mix, leaving it brittle and prone to micro-cracking. But a one-off thorough cleaning where the IPA is removed quickly should be fine. (Note that record cleaning solutions that include IPA are typically no more than 20% IPA, the rest being distilled water. You should never apply undiluted IPA to vinyl LPs).

2. You say the solution removes dirt. Some of it will of course be removed when you wipe the record as it spins, but quite a lot will be left behind. Capilliary action really isn't a very good way of lifting solutions off LPs. What remains gets re-deposited onto the LP when the rest of the IPA evaporates, albeit spread around more evenly rather than in localised spots.

3. LPs that look pristine can be anything but. Even brand new records often have mould release agent still in the grooves that's worth removing. Until you've tried vacuum cleaning it's difficult to appreciate the difference it can make.

How to record a vinyl LP to hard drive

Reply #22 –
Maybe my LPs weren't that dirty to begin with, but I recently installed a new cartridge on my t/t and did some ripping as described above. I would think that a new stylus would gather up existing crud in the grooves and show as a lump of lint on the stylus. I'm seeing a clean stylus when I'm done.