Many people have set about using their computers to record their album and single collections and save them as digital files to put on audio CDs or Mp3 players. Its can be very time consuming work that you really want to get right first time, so what are pitfalls, and what tricks are there to make the job better or quicker?
When I first started recording my record collection I made the mistake of recording lots of singles before listening them through. I was driving along listening to my newly transferred collection and gradually realising that every track had faults and was going to need doing again. So the first piece of advice is this - record a few tracks to start with, and listen them right through before going any further. You really need to make sure your method is reliable and gives a quality product before spending the time working your way through a big collection.
Recording Volume
You'll want to be sure your recordings aren't too quiet, but don't be tempting to whack up the record volume to avoid this. There's a fine line between a full recording and an over-recording with clipped peaks. To start with, do a short trial recording with each record you do, edging the recording volume up and down till its just right. After a while you'll find out where the setting should be with your hardware. 12 inch singles tend to be louder at source than LPs so watch out for that - and sometimes those critters play at 45rpm one side and 33rpm the other, so that's another thing to watch for.
Time saving methods
One question is whether you have to record in real time, and the answer appears to be a very obvious yes, but that doesn't have to be true. You can record a 33rpm album at 45 rpm, then use software to stretch the recording back to its original time. I've tried this method and as far as I can tell there's no loss in quality, but it kind of strikes a wrong chord with me and I don't use this method in practice. What I tend to do is record in the background while I do something else, or just do something else entirely like eat a meal or go for a run.
I do recommend that after you complete a recording, save it initially as a raw data file (such as.wav) because the save will be much quicker that converting to mp3 on the fly. This way you also save best quality, and you can make compressed format versions later using a batch conversion utility (there's a good one in Easy CD-DA Extractor from poikosoft). This is another thing you can run while you go and do something more useful. Wav files are bigger and at one time this would have been an issue, but now that terabyte drives are very affordable there's no need to skimp on this one.
Track splitting
When you've recorded your LP you're left with two files, one for each side and these need splitting into individual tracks. There a several pieces of software that claim they can do this automatically and it looks like a great time saving opportunity. But for me, quality is king and none of these tools work very reliably, and you'll end up with some tracks splitting at quiet sections, or failing to split on short gaps between tracks on some albums. In the end you'll spend longer fixing them later than you can ever save in the first place. The best way to split tracks is manually, particularly if its your music because you'll know for sure where you want tracks to start and finish.
The best professional recording tool is Adobe Audition (or better still if you can find a copy of syntrillium cooledit 200) but its quite expensive, so the budget conscious can work very well with wavepad which even has a free license version.
Removing crackles
Most people will want to remove the crackles from the finished recording, although I know some people leave them on to keep that vinyl authenticity. For me though, it defeats the object of getting a digital copy.
Crackles can be edited off manually, but that would be very time consuming and there are several very functional tools out there to do it for you. My own favourite is DePopper from Droid Software, because it has a batch run facility, so you can stock it up with 20 albums to clean up while you go and watch the Sopranos. I'm sure you've all spotted the trend in this article, if you want to save time, batch utilities are your friend.
© Colne Brooks 2010
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