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Topic: Can't get out of the gate. (Read 6949 times) previous topic - next topic
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Can't get out of the gate.

I have a few questions before I get to the bull-work of vinyl to PC recording.

Goal:
I live overseas for the winter. I want to get some vinyl on an external hdd, such that I can do all the editing later. So for now, all I want is to the get the vinyl digitized while I am around my collection and recording equipment.

Speaking of Equipment:
I am using an old desktop (because it has a pci slot); EMU 1820 sound card (with phone inputs); old school Marantz turntable (serviced and new cartridge/needle). I intend to transfer the new files to an external hdd, take overseas, and use a much newer laptop to do all the editing and work on the files.

Software:
At the moment it's Audacity, but I'm not married to it. The desktop is running XP Pro.

My Thinking:
My intent is to record the vinyl in entire sides. I can do the splitting and everything else at my leisure later (it's a time thing). I thought I would record 24bits and 96,000 sample rate.

Question(s):
My original intent was to save as .wav files, but now that I've done a test recording, I see Audacity can save to it's own .aup project files...but then am I married to it using Audacity (as opposed to Adobe Audition) for editing?
Is there any issue with saving to .wav files vis-a-vis later editing?
Maybe it would be better to decide now on Audacity vs. Audition and start with what I will edit with? The only problem with that is I have Audacity ready to go (more or less), and I don't have Audition to goof around with.

Hdd space is not of great importance; if I have to get another bigger hdd..so be it.
I sort of only have one chance to do this without waiting another year.

Can't get out of the gate.

Reply #1
Well you can't go wrong with wave files because they are just how windows stores uncompressed audio, but I'm pretty sure that there is no reason to use 24/96 because vinyl has a lower SNR than CD. . . so just use 16/44.1 wave.
FLAC -> JDS Labs ODAC/O2 -> Sennheiser HD 650 (equalized)

Can't get out of the gate.

Reply #2
Quote
EMU 1820 sound card (with phone inputs); old school Marantz turntable (serviced and new cartridge/needle).
Your soundcard does NOT have phono inputs.    If you have a stand-alone turntable, you'll need a Phono Preamp[/color][/url] to convert the signal from the phono cartridge to line-level.    Or, if you have an older receiver with a phono-input and tape-outputs, you can connect the tape-output to line-in on your soundcard.

Quote
My original intent was to save as .wav files, but now that I've done a test recording, I see Audacity can save to it's own .aup project files...but then am I married to it using Audacity (as opposed to Adobe Audition) for editing?
Is there any issue with saving to .wav files vis-a-vis later editing?
The AUP file doesn't contain the actual audio.  I recommend "Exporting" to WAV (or FLAC).  Your choice of recording software won't affect sound quality.  It's basically just routing the digital audio data to a file on your hard drive. 

When it comes to "clean-up", your choice of software can make a BIG difference.  I don't have Adobe Audition.  I use Wave Repair ($30 USD).  It does an amazing job on most "clicks" & "pops", and in the manual mode it only "touches" the audio where you identify a defect.  On the downside, it typically takes me a full weekend to fix-up an LP transfer.  This page (by the developer of Wave Repair) has some other software recommendations and a TON of other information about digitizing vinyl.

Quote
My intent is to record the vinyl in entire sides.
There's an advantage to working with one big album file...  Normalization (or other volume adjustments or EQ ajustments) can be done to the whole album, keeping the original relative loudness between songs.

Quote
I thought I would record 24bits and 96,000 sample rate.
There's no harm in that (other than bigger files).  But, 16-bits at 48 or 44.1kHz good enough....  Better than human hearing and far-far-far better than analog vinyl.

Can't get out of the gate.

Reply #3
I do have phono inputs because:
I'm looking at them right now....says 'Phono' and
I've already made several test files recording from turntable.

I thought the better resolution of 24/96 might be better for editing later...it wasn't so much about end listening quality. No?

Can't get out of the gate.

Reply #4
I thought the better resolution of 24/96 might be better for editing later...it wasn't so much about end listening quality. No?

Bit-depths beyond 16 bits are beneficial for editing if the original material has an SNR and noise floor below that level to justify it. Vinyl does not. Sixteen bits will be fine. You can even edit at 16 bits without worrying about adding any noise above the noise floor off the vinyl (unless you deliberately make some ridiculous number/type of edits). Still, you might want to record and edit in 24 bits and finally dither down to 16 for storage.

The sampling rate makes no difference for editing, assuming you have no non-standard requirements for pitch-shifting or suchlike. [edit] Wellll, it can theoretically promote better noise-shaping of dither away to higher frequencies, but the extra benefit from going beyond 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz is unlikely to matter in light of the noise coming off the record itself anyway. [/edit]

Having said that about higher levels of either not being beneficial, they might not even make much difference in terms of additional space consumed if you use lossless compression rather than leaving the files uncompressed. But in the sense of audibility, there is no reason to worry about them.

Can't get out of the gate.

Reply #5
I do have phono inputs because:
I'm looking at them right now....says 'Phono' and
I've already made several test files recording from turntable.
  I apologize.     I didn't see that on their web page.    It clearly does say "Turntable" with an RIAA preamp.  Perfect!

Quote
I thought the better resolution of 24/96 might be better for editing later...it wasn't so much about end listening quality. No?
Again, there's no harm in that.  Probably no benefit either.  Pos use 24/96 "by default".  If you were messing around with vinyl in a pro studio, they wouldn't switch to a lower resolution.

Can't get out of the gate.

Reply #6
I use VinylStudio (from the Mac App Store but it's cross-platform.) It does everything I need it to do including manual or auto click-removal. It's sort of an all-in-one solution. The learning-curve was far simpler than most other software for me. You can try it out and if you like it I think it costs like $30 USD. Worth it IMO considering the features and organizational convenience. (I'm not trying to "sell" this program in this forum...I just genuinely like and recommend it.)

Clean up beyond just ticks and pops is better handled by programs like iZotope RX2 or Audition. I don't usually try to make my needledrops sound too clinical though. I love a good vinyl transfer. The sound of the vinyl (if that's your thing/not for everyone, I know) but with the convenience and rock-solid stability of digital.
The Loudness War is over. Now it's a hopeless occupation.

Can't get out of the gate.

Reply #7
My Thinking:
My intent is to record the vinyl in entire sides. I can do the splitting and everything else at my leisure later (it's a time thing). I thought I would record 24bits and 96,000 sample rate.


You'll find that separating the tracks form an entire side goes really fast. Using Audition I find the start or track 1, move 1/2 earlier as the start and delete everything before the 1/2 second. If you want to do a fast fade up in that 1/2 second that's a possibility. Now find the start of track 2 and move earlier by 1/2 second again. Highlight everything down to 0 time and save selection and then delete the selection and move to the next track. A 5 track side should be done in a few minutes. Because you're separating / saving to the sample, when you burn those WAVs onto a CD it will play through with no disturbance and the timing will be perfect. While I don't waste time on LPs, I do this a lot from both digital and analog tape recordings and it really is easy once you get into the flow.

You can use the high sample and bit rate but you'll have to process it back to 16 bit 44100 so why wast the time? Just get the levels right in the first place so you don't waste too much time 'post processing'. Unfortunately you'll find significant level differences between discs as there was no consistent operating point even on the same label.

I usually do a gain adjust of 0 dB to process out any residual DC followed by a noise reduce pass and possibly EQ and/or a hard limit at 0.05 dB below full scale but there is usually virtually nothing to limit.

It can be fun and satisfying but I confess to buying CDs to replace the LPs. I find nothing musical about surface noise, ticks, pops, wow/flutter and mistracking. The fact that LPs sounded pretty good says a lot about the engineers but I'll take digital every day. Media that doesn't wear out and degrade and then all the disc and stylus cleaners and anti-static fiddling. YUCK.

I still maintain that some folks were SO USED to hearing LPs shortcomings that when the shortcomings are removed, they feel something is 'missing'. I have been fooled by digital recordings a few times ( the guy talking to me on the recording when I answered myself and a phone ring on a CD and went to pick up the phone.) Never once was I fooled by an analog recording in 40+ years.

Have fun with it.


Can't get out of the gate.

Reply #8
I thought the better resolution of 24/96 might be better for editing later...it wasn't so much about end listening quality. No?

In principle recording at higher resolutions has no downsides and has the potential upside of reducing any accumulation of rounding errors as you apply edits.

However, the noise floor of vinyl is so high that you can perform several global DSP operations (even truncating the results without dither) and the added quantisation noise will still remain way below the vinyl noise. In addition, there are some useful tools that only work at 16 bit, so by recording at 24 bit you deny yourself access to those tools. Therefore: record at 16 bit.

Some people believe that the higher bandwidth might enable click detection algorithms to work better.

But the signal bandwidth from vinyl is pretty restricted, and clicks & pops do not have ultra-high frequency components. This means that if you record at 96kHz, the leading edge of a click will most likely NOT be expressed as a single-sample discontinuity (whereas when recorded at 44.1 or 48kHz it will). So in fact detection algorithms that spot outliers like this actually work better at the lower sampling rate. Therefore: record at 44.1 or 48kHz. (Definitely use 44.1kHz if your eventual aim is to create audio format CDs).

Finally, when it comes to cleaning up the recordings, general purpose editors such as Audacity and Audition are tedious to use. There are more specialised packages out there that are better suited to the task. But you do will probably need a general purpose audio editor as well. You can't have too many tools.

Can't get out of the gate.

Reply #9
You'll find that separating the tracks form an entire side goes really fast.
One click using this...
http://www.milosoftware.com/en/index.php?body=cdwave.php

If it's available on CD, and it sounds good on CD, buy the CD.

Make sure you set the levels correctly - avoid clipping anything. Recording a little low is OK.

Make sure there is no unwanted noise or hum before you start - listen to the first transfer very carefully before you do the rest.

Consider cleaning the records.

Read the many good threads about LP2CD that are here.

Don't overdo the restoration.

Good luck!

Cheers,
David.

Can't get out of the gate.

Reply #10
Agree with 2Bdecided.

In general I think it's better to purchase CDs instead of recording vinyl unless the vinyl is unavailable or only available badly mastered on CD.  YMMV if you have no money and lots of free time.

CD Wave is an excellent program for splitting LP sides into songs, and always splits on CD sector boundaries, important with live and other gapless albums.  It's currently abandonware.

ClickRepair is a great non-free program for one click vinyl noise removal.  If you have lots of free time feel free to play around with individually removing pops and clicks.

Can't get out of the gate.

Reply #11
CD Wave is an excellent program for splitting LP sides into songs, and always splits on CD sector boundaries, important with live and other gapless albums.  It's currently abandonware.
It was already perfect and bug-free nearly two decades ago though - I'd call it "stable" rather than "abandoned"!