Recording Vinyls to PC?

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Benzowner

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Does anyone know, is it possible to record vinyl records onto your PC. Is it as easy as plugging the record deck into a USB or serial port, excluding the amp of course, and should you use a magnetic or higher output cartridge?
 
you are better going from the aux out of your amp into the line in on your soundcard. so you'll need a decent soundcard, some recording software (don't use windows recoorder it's crap) and I'd also recommend using some sort of vinyl filter when transferring to digital recordings - have a look at SoundForge - it's expensive but it's without equal and will do the whole procedure almost painlessly

Andy
 
Geoff2 said:
Does anyone know, is it possible to record vinyl records onto your PC. Is it as easy as plugging the record deck into a USB or serial port, excluding the amp of course, and should you use a magnetic or higher output cartridge?

As Andy has said, use the Auxilliary input on your sound card. The USB or serial ports will not do anything!

You will need to have a record deck with a phono stage built in, or use some form of external pre-amp for this purpose.

From memory, the signal level from some record decks can be as low as 0.03 volts!

When you have the hardware side of things taken care of, you can then start the process of recording onto your PC.

I am sure you can get some software specifically for this purpose, which includes filtering and noise reduction. Or if it is purely for archiving, perhaps look at what most other people do and check out some of the MP3 sites available! :)

Cheers,

Will
 
I heard of a program ages ago called audio ripper, Dont know if its of any use to you.
 
Hi,
check this site out for tips / software :)

cdfreaks

I agree that soundforge is very good but last I heard it was around $400 !!! its also quite complicated.

The basis of converting records to a/n other format is

1) record to a wav or other lossless file. (will be very large in size 50meg per track +)
2) Clean the clicks and scratches out of the recording (using sound filters)
3) convert the clean recording to a new compressed format of your choice (MP3 Ogg ACC)
(the last two bits are processor intentensive stuff so be prepared for a lot of waiting around :)

I use a program called audiograbber for ripping cd to MP3 I seem to remember that you can use it for converting records, I think it has plugin filters available as well :)

Any help ?

Peter
 
Thanks all, I have realised that I have Real Jukebox/player on my PC, maybe I can use something on there. Something to get my teethe into, so to speak :D
 
pluggers said:
I heard of a program ages ago called audio ripper, Dont know if its of any use to you.


If I remember rightly, it's for copying CD's to WAV files, then compressing the WAVs to MP3s. Useful once you've got the vinyl recorded to WAVs if you want to create mp3s. I liked this program as you can set what encoder to use, and its bitrate. For those like me that want true quality in your recordings, use the LAME encoder, 256 Bitrate for that true CD quality sound.
 

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