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I always make a high-quality MP3 of anything
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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.
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