What a GREAT thread In the near future I will start importing my LPs into my MM library. My system resources require that I connect my turntable to my computer using a USB 2.0 or PCMCIA port. I'm thinking about the following:
iMic 2 for the connection to the USB
Audacity for importing and enhancing the analog audio

Thanks in advance for any advice/suggestions/warnings/etc,

Bill - Also retired and loving it.

This is the way I do it, and have thousands of old albums.

First some observations on vinyl. You may be better off with vinyl than a digital re-master. That may not make sense to you, but it is true. The current fad for digitial remasters to mix the tracks with very high volume that exceeds 0db, its called compression. I just had a discussion on that last month, and there were some good articles linked. So save those old Capitol Stereo Beatles albums--they are better than the new CD's. Other tracks will have hiss or scratches that will not warrant ripping--just buy the CD's. Most tracks will be better with CDs I will say.

Second on the hardware. Get a first class turntable and a new cartridge or stylus. Garbage in, Garbage out. Doesn't have to be expensive. I got a basic turntable for $400 plus a $300 Grado cartridge. Works fine.

Third, get a decent 16 bit sound card, external is better and will have less hum from the CPU fan. MBox or Layla are two good brands. One with a headphone jack will help so you can actually hear what is being sent into the hard drive.

Fourth, I use any cheap software, like Spin It Again for $30 to record the tracks. Gold Wave works too. Your sound card may have amplification within the card, and it is likely that you will need it. The output of a stylus is but a fraction of a CD. You can boost it later, but a good sound card will make the difference. You can also use a phono pre-amp which boosts the signal significantly higher than your stereo receiver phono pre-amp.

Fifth, I just lay the tracks down in one continual file for both sides of the album. It will be a large file but so what. It makes numbering easier for the tracks, and you can follow along.

Sixth, I use Gold Wave software to split and edit the tracks. First I boost the volume to a tad over .5db, with the peaks approachinig but never going to 0db. Remember, once you reach 0db there is distortion and cut outs. Gold Wave ($30) makes it really easy to do this with pre-set volume controls, like increasing the record volume 200% or 250%. You can customize those. I have about 20 pre-sets. Expect to boost the average ablum anywhere from 150-350% to get it up to .5db.

Seventh, once the file is boosted, then do all your processing. You'll need to use Gold Wave's Effects Menu to reduce hum, crackle and pops. There are plenty of pre-sets for all of this. The actuall processing will take a long time for a large single file, about 3-5 minutes.

Eight, now that you have the volume and effects done, and the tracks sound good, its time to split the tracks. Track Splitters don't work. They chop off too much or leave too much dead silence, and that has to be trimmed anyway, so it is super easy to look at the file and pick where the track starts and ends, about 5 seconds. I just name them just like the CD--Beatles - I Want to Hold Your Hand.wav

Ninth, after you split the tracks, each individual track may need special treatement, for cracks or volume. Again, I use Gold Wave.

Finally I once over on all the tracks, making sure they are a consistent volume and sound good, then use MM to scan the tracks and add them to the MM Database.

I've done this over and over again all summer long. I will say that buyiing the CD is way easier and unless it is highly compressed, it will be easier and will sound better.

I do agree you get what you pay for. If the deal sounds too good to be true odds are it is not a deal!

One last comment from me - no disrespect meant here. Defrag reorders cluster on a HD it does not apply any compression to the data within. If it did that it would be more than just mp3's affected. May be MP3 player software as a whole have a bit of lag time when taking the digital data to convert to analog and some of the data used to create the first and last wave sign is missing hense the squelch sound. We think we have not removed some of the audio signal but being human we are slow and also we are using a graphiical representation of the signwave to judge our editing which may not be that exact. So when you leave a smidget of what appears to be silence we do not touch the sub harmonics that may be present and needed to complete the sound to it's natural state. As for personal CD mp3 players. Mp3's are not that forgiving as they have 1/10th the data to recreate the sound. Should some dust get in the way more of the data is missed or the drive motor is not of very good quality you may get fluxtuations causing bad data reads. The solid state mp3 players do not have this problem so if the source data is not corupt then the unit should recreate the song the same way it plays back on your HD. Note hard drives have self recalibration technology that that adjust the heads to keep them on track as the drive heats up but I don't think that this should impact playback of Mp3's.

JLG234 wrote:When I meant cut out the silent spaces I meant the extra space at the beginning of the whole track, inbetween Side A and B and at the end of the whole tract that is a result of not being there to stop the recording process on time. You still need to see the breaks between cuts (The visual demarkation points) in order to split the individual songs from the whole.

I have never had the problem that you mention after all an mp3 is just a file that has a beginning and an end and is not reliant on silent passage for demarkation. The fade in and out is a human thing that is more pleasing to the ear. If a file goes corupt it is more likely due to a hardware/media failure. Audio is just digital data within the file boundaries. May be the MP3 program needs silent spaces to process the song boundaries but there does not seem to be any issues when dealing with spaces between the spoken word as in a recorded conversation that may have a long pause between words.

May be you are confusing the "gap" that is placed between tracks while burning the CD. Some programs allow you to adjust the size of the gap. This gap is not to be confused with data representing silence within a song whether it be at the beginning, during or end.

no what happened is i removed the silent space from the song right up to the second the sound started and right at the second it quit. but when i did a defragment the song was messed up. it got some sort of squashed and or squeling squaking sound for about a half a second at both the front and the end of the song. but when i reput the song back in and left them with 2 seconds of silent space in front and at the end of the song the next time i defraged the hd no errors were caused. so the silent space is needed for something to block the file from getting errors.

has not happened to me again, since i do that now on every song.

the gap between the songs is too small on some cheap portable cdrom players when you put more then 21 songs on the cdrom so small that it will cause the cdrom player to skip songs because it can not see the gap
that has happned to me on every cheap portable cdrom player i got. but not if i don't go over 21 songs.

if i go to 25 songs the silent space added to the song files has helped the portable cdrom player to find the gap between the last couple songs.

but if i go to 30 songs there is not enough room to put enough space between the last few songs for any portable player to see and they will skip several songs all the time. the only thing that plays that many songs is the PC cdrw drive which has a better leaser in.

so that is why i give the FYI to use leave the slient space on the song files.
so what happened to me does not happen to others.

When I meant cut out the silent spaces I meant the extra space at the beginning of the whole track, inbetween Side A and B and at the end of the whole tract that is a result of not being there to stop the recording process on time. You still need to see the breaks between cuts (The visual demarkation points) in order to split the individual songs from the whole.

I have never had the problem that you mention after all an mp3 is just a file that has a beginning and an end and is not reliant on silent passage for demarkation. The fade in and out is a human thing that is more pleasing to the ear. If a file goes corupt it is more likely due to a hardware/media failure. Audio is just digital data within the file boundaries. May be the MP3 program needs silent spaces to process the song boundaries but there does not seem to be any issues when dealing with spaces between the spoken word as in a recorded conversation that may have a long pause between words.

May be you are confusing the "gap" that is placed between tracks while burning the CD. Some programs allow you to adjust the size of the gap. This gap is not to be confused with data representing silence within a song whether it be at the beginning, during or end.

FYI. tip as in other messages i posted you need to have silent space infront of the songs and the end of the songs.

not only for the cheap portable cdrom players to beable to see the gap between the songs but also for on your computer when you defrag the hard drive it might mess up the songs as it has with some of my songs.
when i did not have the silent space there. so i put it back and have not had any trouble with the defragmentor messing them up yet.?

Great! - I just tried it out and it works great. I have Title then Artist (cut and paste to reorg command line). What I will mention as well is that it remembers the last settings used. So if you point to a new folder that is what will come up the next time when you target another folder to process.
You have to remember to return the command line to ".\<....." inorder to keep the files in their parent folder (providing you want them there). This way you just target the folder, select "Auto Org" and then "OK".


After having read other posts I was under the impression that "artist and Title" were tied together.

Note: Rename Wizzard is great in cleaning up file names that have other crap in them and tags don't exist. Can be used on any files such as jpg etc.

5) The good part - apply "Auto Organize" to that folder and it will rename your files using the tag info imbedded in the file.

6) for those that don't want the artist included in the file name or would prefer it after the name of the song this can be altered using a program like "Rename Wizzard" which is a search and replace program plus more.
Don't forget to rescan to pick up the changes.

Tip!
There's no need to use other programs to just rename the file.
With "Auto-Organize" feature you can (in one batch) either:
- Just rename the files without moving them.
- Just move the files into new or existing folders without rename the files.
- Any combination of the above.

Man has it just gotten easier to name those cut in ripping LP's.

1) Rip whole LP side a and b using Audacity - don't worry if you didn't get back before side a finished just pause the recording flip and un-pause.

2) Cut out the dead space at the beginning, in between side a and b and at the end.

3) export either the whole LP for future splitting or split now selecting each cut and exporting it as an MP3 file. Supply the common ID3 tag info eg. album name - artist etc - you are only asked for the 1st save. Save the file(s) in a new folder labled Artist - LP name. Make sure you lable the file as "track #.mp3" (where # is the appropriate number).

[/u]Note: I recommend starting a new Audacity process for each LP so that it will prompt for the ID3 tag info else it keeps and applies the old info.[/u]

4) when you have had enough just scan the folders into MM and do a "Auto Tag w/Amazon on the folder name. The search comes back with an error. Just over type the search with the artist (2 spaces) album name

It should come back with the info and it should be able to match your tracks and tag the ID info.

5) The good part - apply "Auto Organize" to that folder and it will rename your files using the tag info imbedded in the file.

6)for those that don't want the artist included in the file name or would prefer it after the name of the song this can be altered using a program like "Rename Wizzard" which is a search and replace program plus more.
Don't forget to rescan to pick up the changes.

[/u](ignore step 6 and read below)[/u]

I hope this helps[/u]

I have tried various auto track splitting software and have found that if the music tracks have soft or silent passages they get treated as track breaks.

What I use now is a turntable, Radio shack mixer and Audacity (Free on the WWW) and save a whole LP as one track applying the common LP info to the ID3 tag on saving leaving the song title blank (the reason is that on reloading the track into audacity all the common tag info will be kept when you split the songs). The program allows you to pause while you flip the LP to side B Don't worry if you missed the end of the LP and recorded silence as you can cut it out before saving. The idea here is to get the LP's into Digital format for later reprocessing/splitting as you have time. You still can listen to your LP's as they are now in MP3 format. Once you have split your tracks into their individual cuts and save them as MP3's under their song title MediaMonkey should be able to auto tag them. You cannot get away from manually renaming the individual cuts as vinyl has no digital ID info to apply.

Another point of interest - Do you really want to split ALL the songs or just your favorite cuts. By doing it this way you get the whole LP as one MP3 and then just retrieve the cuts that you favor. Save the original LP track in an "LP work in progress" folder using the Artist-Album cover name as the file name. That way you do not lose track of what LP is recorded and can look the Album up on the net to get the title names in the future should you not be able to remember it. Once you have enough LP-MP3's just offload them to CD/DVD for archiving purpose and to free up space to convert more. For more discussion on this just drop me an e-mail.

they way i do it is record the albums to cassette tapes.

by running them through the home unit's eq that is the first step in editing them.

then take them to the boombox and play the tape's in it and run them through a patch cord from the headphone to the sound card's line in jack.

and i use the free with the soundblaster wave studio to record them with.
i then save them to wav files and open the automatrix wav editor and adjust the chorus and echo and volume in there and try to get rid of the biggest neddle skips.

then save the wav file and then use cdex ripper to convert them to ogg format, (because monkey wont volume analyze them if i use monkey to convert them, unknown why?)

then i use monkey to organize them and move them to their proper folder.

thats how i put the songs in the computer.

um?? 750 albums with 12 songs on each thats 9000 songs.

8 to 10 songs for a half hour. takes me one hour to put them in the computer. thats 900 hours for those albums.

thats a long time at one day a week?

Hi and welcome
This is a question that requires you to possibly purchase a small box that will interface between the turntable and your PC. The software is out there for doing this project. I have not made a final choice as to what I'm going to use since I have a large tape library as well. The space between tracks is goping to be preserved unless you manuall edit it. One program that can help you and is reasonably priced (free trial, btw) is Ashampoo Audio Center 3. Several others from PCDJ, etc are also helpful. (There is a BLOG at www.jffdj.com and he answeres e-mail). Good luck

Hi everybody! Mike here trying to get help re auto track separation and naming for lp. records I'm recording.I can't imagine how much work to do manually to over 750 albums and thats before I get really serious!This program is giving me hope that I can at last I have found refuge from players and soft-ware that works poorly at best! Cheers!