Transferring Music from Vinyl into a Computer
Lecture Notes 1/11/2005
Why would you do it?
- To copy the music to a more convenient format.
- To improve the sound quality of tracks from damaged records.
- To sell your valuable old LPs on eBay without losing the music.
What do you need?
- A record deck (obviously)
- A computer with a Line In socket
- A preamplifier (usually) to increase the weak signal from the record deck.
- Software
All Hooked Up
Software
- Windows Sound Recorder - built into Windows but very limited.
- Audacity - free and good for recording and editing.
- Wave Corrector - £20 - excellent for noise and click removal. A free trial version is available but it will only process the first 2 minutes of a track.
- Adobe Audition - $299 - industrial strength (Used to be CoolEdit). A time limited trial version is available.
Before you Start
Read the comprehensive tutorial at http://www.wavecor.co.uk/tutorial.htm. It includes information about
- Equipment overview
- Setting up the record deck
- Stylus Maintenance
- Record Cleaning
- The recording process
Get Organised
- An LP worth of sound recording takes around 500MB. Be sure that you have available space
- I suggest you create a folder on your desktop for each LP.
- This will contain the raw recording, a cleaned up version and the resulting individual tracks.
Quality and File Format
- Record and do any intermediate work in .wav format.
- This doesn’t lose data in compression and thus maintains audio quality whilst you’re working.
- When the job is done, by all means also save the result as an .mp3 file.
- Audacity can convert from .wav to .mp3.
Demonstrations
- We saw how to record from an LP using Audacity.
- We saw how Wave Corrector is quite good at noise reduction.
- We saw how Audition is also quite good at noise reduction but we preferred the results achieved by Wave Corrector.
During the evening, we heard far too much of the opening couple of minutes of a Neil Diamond Track 
.