HOME
TOPICS
ABOUT ME
M AIL

 
I always make a high-quality MP3 of anything I put on CD.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
Putting those old LPs onto home-grown CDs


June 29, 2003


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard

   Nostalgia is a big motivator. Of all the questions I get about the entertainment side of personal computing, the one that I hear most often concerns putting old LP records onto CDs.
   This week I'll tell you how to do that. If you've missed the earlier installments in this series on computer audio, you'll probably need to refer to them to make sense out of this installment. You can find them on my Web site, http://technofileonline.
   You need to have your record player (or turntable) connected to your stereo system already. Do that by plugging the two cables into the left and right "Phono" input jacks of your receiver. You then use your receiver's tape monitor loop, treating your computer as if it were a tape deck. (I explained the how and why of this in an earlier installment.) The tape monitor loop makes sure that the audio signals from the records you're playing are sent to your computer's audio circuit.
   Start with a single LP that you know is in good shape. Clean it thoroughly in warm, sudsy water, using Ivory Liquid or a similar mild dish detergent. Rinse it with a long wash of warm water and blot it totally dry. Be sure to clean the stylus, too, using a child's water-color brush dipped in vodka or distilled water. (No, I'm not kidding; one of them works better than the other, but I'm a teetotaler and use the less-effective method myself.)
   Run your recording software. Set it up to create a CD-quality WAV file (for Windows) or AIFF file (also called AIF) for Macs. Your software's Help menu can explain this if you can't find the right setting.
   Put the software into "monitor" mode or "record pause," whichever it is called, so that the recording meters are turned on. Set the recording level as high as possible without exceeding zero on the meters. To do this, find the loudest passage (check each side of the record) by looking for the area of biggest wiggles in the grooves. Play that passage while you adjust the recording level to a point just below zero or just short of where the lights turn red.
   Click the "Record" button in the computer's software, then play Side 1. Do another recording for Side 2. If the music is supposed to be continuous, later on you can join the two files -- the two sides, in other words -- through a copy-and-paste operation.
   Save each recording twice -- once as a backup copy in case the original gets messed up and once for a version you can edit. In your audio editing program, perform the following actions if they are available (skipping ones that are not):
   Trim (to remove extraneous sounds at the beginning and the end)
   Fade (into the start of the music and out of the end; keep it quick)
   DC Offset removal (to clean up the sound)
   Declicking (to remove LP "click" noises)
   Depopping (to take out LP "popping" sounds)
   Normalization (to bring the overall volume level up in case it's too low)
   You'll find many other editing functions, but avoid the drastic ones until you have more experience.
   Save each edited file, being sure to name each file sensibly. When you have enough music to fill a CD (no more than an hour of audio), create an audio CD using your CD burner's software. I recommend Nero for Windows and Toast Titanium for Macs.
   Ready to make MP3 versions? I always make a high-quality MP3 of anything I put on CD. That way I've got a version I can play on the computer without a fuss. (The MP3 version is ideal for portable players, too.)
   If you have Windows and don't have software to create MP3s, go to www.dbpoweramp.com. and get the free dBpowerAMP Music Converter. Mac OS X users already have the encoding software as part of iTunes. Set the encoding rate high enough to ensure good quality. I recommend at least 192 kilobits for casual music, 256 kilobits for music you care about and 320 kilobits for your best recordings. (Leave the other number in the MP3 settings at 44.1 kHz.) You'll note that these numbers are much higher than most people use. A lifetime love of sound has convinced me that lower rates just plain sound bad.
   A couple of tips: First, for very important recordings, save the original audio file (the WAV or AIFF file, in other words) on a CD for storage before you edit it or turn it into an audio CD. You might want to edit the music again later when you have better software. Second, transfer cassette tapes to CD the same basic way, using the tape monitor loop. Finding the loudest passage on a tape is a lot harder than finding it on an LP, but otherwise the procedure is the same.