Anyone Out There Ever Ripped Vinyl & Tape?

[BobHelms]

Hello,
Another newbie here. First of all it is clear to me that MM is THE way to go for managing a digital music library. It has everything I need / want to playback the music I've been collecting since 1954 (dating myself here). Of course the first step is converting all of it to FLAC, WAV or whatever file format I decide on. So I've been reading / searching for quite a while now in this forum on "How To Rip", found 446 hits. I've gained an enormous amount of information on ripping CD's. As you might guess there were no CD's in 1954. Now I realize that this is a MM forum and not the place to be asking hardware questions but I'm thinking that since everyone here more than likely uses MM they would have also made good decisions on how to convert any vinyl and tape they have in addition to their CD's. Having said all of that my intent is to build a Music Server using a XP Pro laptop with external USB disk drives as a standalone MM platform. Now my first / biggest task is converting all the 45's, LP's, Reel to Reel, and Cassettes (around 36,000, mostly rock & roll) that make up my vinyl & tape collection. I sure I'm not the first person to face this dilemma and what I'm after here is opinions and experience gained from the veterans who make up this forum. TIA for any help /support I can get!
Bob Helms

[jc836]

From the Oldies but Goodies world of Wolfman Jack, Porky Chedwick and early Elvis on 78's I can say that you do have a task at hand. Mine dilemna is the same as yours up to a point. What you will need is a really good sound card to input from either a mixing board or other means. You might consider Acoustica's software package that is tailored to the task too. I will also suggest that you visit www.jffdj.com. Bill is like you and I-an oldtimer who really does have it together. Drop him an e-mail and he will respond. Hope this gets you going on digitizing of your library.
As to MM-you got it right. This is the best I have found for both desktop and portable use. Using it in the mode you want will be an interesting work on your part. Have fun.

[rovingcowboy]

okay you might be the real one and only bobby helms from what it reads like in your reply. great songs you did.


as for the tape to pc route you will need to do the via patch cord way. i did an article on how to do that the old way. but i found a newer set up that works wonders.

and you get free software with the hardware to do it.

in the american music supply mag.. you can find an cheap $99.00 + S&H and tax usb turn table.
it comes with rca jacks to plug in your cdrom player and or your portable tape decks.

it also comes with a couple of software programs bundled with it. you will like the way the AudaCity program works. has presets for the different Record companys, like RCA's 78's or columbia's Lp's so after you get the songs in the computer you can adjust the sound according to the way the albums were pressed.
believe me you will see the older then 1985 albums almost always need that done to them.

along with that feature it has click removal and noise removal and speed up and slow down of the playing incase you have 78's you play them on the table at 45 if they don't skip and then you slow them down to the speed for 78's that does not have all presets but doing the math to figure the percentage is not hard.

after you get that done you can just export the songs to wav or mp3 or ogg i think mp3 and ogg need another encoder added to use them so i just use the wav and then use monkey to convert them to the other formats.
and to add in all the tag info.

just you sound like you need huge hard drives so you better make sure you got a big enough network of them or a lot of computers to use in doing this..

when you put the songs in the computers the wav format takes about 10 mb's per one minute of song. so you will need lots of free space on the system, and lots of ram. on my old slow system i used one 6 gb hard drive for only the swap file.

the reason audacity is so good of editor or line in recorder is the way it works. it uses several second segments of the songs instead of one long wav file. it saves the segments and posts them as the whole song so you don't have to keep tons of songs filling the ram. how ever audacity will crash after 6 or 7 hours of adding songs in because it can't keep alot of them in the system's temp folder because that much time fills up the swap file in the system.
so try to remember that cause if it crashes you lose what ever project you were working on that was not saved.
that happened once to me and only once i said not again.

so the newer easier way is

1. get usb turn table with rca jacks.
2. use audacity to do all the sound adjustment
2,a. if you want to you can open the wav files with another wav editor and boost the volume of the file in it. audacity won't make them as loud of a file as you can in other software.
3. use mediamonkey to convert and add tag info and organize the library.

4. use mediamonkey to play songs and enjoy them if you have time after doing all the song adding.

warning don't do more then 60 or 70 songs in a day that is a lot to do all the adjusting on.
and i did 100 in a day but was worn out for about 2 weeks after that. i just got back in to adding songs
the last couple of days.

in using the above system i have put in almost 800 songs and at least 7 concerts of different lenghts in to the system since jan 9th. so that turn table takes out the wasted time of redoing the tapes after you put the albums on the tapes which is the old way i was doing it.

[BobHelms]

rovingcowboy;
No I'm not that Bobby Helms, but he does do a mean version of "Jingle Bell Rock" don't he. I should have supplied more information in my original post. I already have a extensive analog setup with 2 turntables, 4 channel mixing board and a switching patching / panel for adding components for 2 tape monitor circuits. What I'm looking for is an interface unit to convert whatever analog signal I feed it to a digital wav, flac or whatever I choose file format. I was hoping someone in this forum had gone down that path before and could make a suggestion or tell me what NOT to use to accomplish my objective. I didn't want to write a book on the first post because I was afraid no one would take the time to read all of it. I didn't see any means of attaching files to this post or I would have included a picture of my existing system. Thanks again for your input. BTW I have Bobby Helms on several old 45's ready to be converted.
Bob Helms

[rovingcowboy]

so you want a hardware converter unit.? might be one in the american music supply mag?
i just use the computer and mediamonkey or cdex, to do the converting i do the albums from the turntable called
"ion ttusbosxl USB turntable" but they are one at a time. how ever the audacity software has a silent feature
so you can use that to find the gaps in the middle of the songs.
so you could just run your reel to reel in to the computer with that software picking up the signial from the line in jack on your sound card. and after 2 hours if you have that much ram, you could then stop and select the long track and tell it to find the gaps.
it will just make a track line under the recorded track and place flags on it in the location of the gaps. if they are correct there is a split feature, i think that will split the songs at the flags? i just use the flags to show me where to select then i just export that selection as one wav file.

but it will get the gaps in the song also, which makes that feature a tough one to use unless you know the songs you are putting in don't pause in the middle then start again.

you might be needing to talk with scooter i think he has the info you need.
he's out in cal.. LA. and has millions of songs in his system, he has so many i think he is in
the movie industry and uses mediamonkey.

there are some dee jay's in the forum, i think lowlander is one, and maybe jc836 i think he might know the hardware and then peke is one of them he might know what equipment you want
he's been around the horn and so forth so he knows lots of old equipment.
but as long as you got the equipment and space on the hd's you should be able to get a good copy by way
of the patch cord, good meaning no power hum or static.

as for the book in the forum posts? we read them we are all ones that read long posts to see if we can help.

[jc836]

M Audio and another company have a very small interface unit that will do the trick too. The OP has a very complete setup like I have and should be able to patch thru the add-on box to the sound card. If I understand things, he will also want the ability to remove tape hiss, clicks and pops as well as control gaps.
Just a few more thoughts

[MMan]

It sounds like you need two things, the Hardware "patch" from your analog system to the computer and editing software for the files once converted. I can't speak to audacity's ability to "clean" files, but I have used it to extract portions of tracks and it is relatively easy to use to for a beginner. However, there may be other software specifically designed to clean tracks.

As to the hardware "patch", jc83 I think is on the right track. However, you said that you want to use a laptop as your music server. Most of the M Audio stuff is PCI based, they don't have a great USB suite. I chose ESI's Juli@ PCI card, about $130 . It has a great combination of I/O ports and solid ADC and DAC. If you choose the right sound card, you may kill two birds with one stone. Not only can you get one with RCA inputs which feed a solid Analog to Digital Converter, you also would get a good solution if you wanted to use Monkey to play your digital music back across your home audio system. If you get a card that supports ASIO drivers and digital outputs, you can use the Monkey ASIO plugin to feed the output directly to the sound card. Running the Monkey output through the normal windows sound processing causes it to go through several processors and mixers that can alter the sound and increase the latency. Monkey has the ability to use an ASIO plugin to have the output go directly to the sound card, where it can be converted by the card's DAC and sent analog to your stereo or if the card has digital output, it can be sent digitally to the stereo to be processed by its DAC. I did a fair amount of research to find a card I liked and I use its DAC because I think that it sounds better than when I send the digital output to my stereo's DAC.

As you search for a new card, I will pass on that I bought my card online from Florida Music: http://www.floridamusicco.com/

Even though I had made the choice to go with the Juli@, I happened to call them and got one of their employees on the phone. He was a Brit, but I never got his name. Too bad, in hindsight, very freindly "chap". He spent 45 minutes + discussing pros and cons and was the first to hightlight the need to use ASIO to eliminate the windows mixer. If you are still looking, check them out and give them a call, they may be able to help you on both the Hardware and software. They cater to the recording studio crowd but were freindly to me.

Here a link to my setup if interested.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... &sk=t&sd=a

Good Luck!

[BobHelms]

jc836,
I send an email to Bill at jffdj.com. Haven't heard back yet but thanks for the suggestion. I've looked at USB Sound Boards till I'm nearly blind. They all tout their playback strengths. Don't all sound boards record also? I'm hoping that with your experience this question won't be misplaced. Thanks again to everyone for their help and input.
Bob Helms

[jc836]

Bob: You will get a reply shortly from Bill.
There are several choices available and one does have I/O on it. Check out Echo Audio PCMCIA card at http://www.guitarcenter.com as one possibility. Then wait for Bill's reply

[BobHelms]

It's amazing just how simple things can be when you talk to someone who knows what's happening. I just got off the phone with John at floridamusicco.com. He sensed right away that I needed help in my conversion project. He then guided me to a unit on their web site that fit my needs to a T. What a difference 5 minutes with someone who knows what he's talking about makes. I'm ordering the equipment (Ikey Audio Iconnex USB Soundcard) today. Thanks to all you guys MMan, jc386 and rovingcowboy. I'll post a progress report when I get knee deep in all those 45's and LP's.
Bob Helms

[MMan]

I'm glad they were as helpful to you as they were to me. Good luck and welcome to the Monkey community.

[raharris]

If you want to go high end, sound wise (and this is clearly not a project you want to do again), this month's Stereophile Magazine has an article re: ripping vinyl.

Robert Harris

[BobHelms]

If you want to go high end, sound wise (and this is clearly not a project you want to do again), this month's Stereophile Magazine has an article re: ripping vinyl.

Robert Harris

Hi Robert,
Did a search on Stereophile Mags website for 'ripping vinyl'. Found lots of ads but no article. Can you elaborate on same? Thanks.
Bob Helms

[raharris]

It is in current subscription issue (and presumably at newsstands) I think and will probably not be on there website for a month or so

Looks to be gigantic hassle as you have to

1) Do it real time
2) Create your own "breaks" between songs
3) Do all of the tagging MANUALLY

For LP's you give up any future improvements in playback devices (ie record players, stylus performance, etc,)

Good luck

[Robert Harris]

Another "solution" might be as follows

Put some type of "locater" among your albums, tapes, etc. For example, put a "divider" every 30 LP's or so - like the record stores used to have for each artist. Label each divider with some type of logical sequential numbering scheme, ie Divider 1, Divider 2...

Put tapes in some type of orderly arrangement, ie Shelf 1, stack1, Shelf 2, Stack 3, etc - a 2 dimensional array.

Put your Lp's, tapes etc on the shelves. The location is really unimportant now as the computer can always find and sort for you.

Put a small label on each item with the "location". Avery makes tiny labels that work well
An LP might be at divider 20, a tape at Shelf 1, Stack3, etc.

The label allows to to find the item AND put the item back where it goes ("inventory control")

Create a prototype album entry in a Windows directory - with multiple "tracks" in the album. Allow enough tracks for any album you might have - say 20.
This is just going to be a place holder for information. File types and lengths are unimportant. Actually you want short files to minimize space requirements.

Copy the prototype album and track entries into your music folder

Import this album in MediaMonkey

"Edit" the name of the album and the track names in MediaMonkey with appropriate info from the album you are "importing".

This must be done manually (but you were going to have to do this manually anyway)

Under the custom fields in MediaMonkey, enter the Location. You might have Custom 1 = Shelf #, Custom 2 = Stack #, Custom 3 = Divider #. You can rename the Custom fields as appropriate

Repeat for each album until you can't take it anymore. Have a drink or three. Repeat.

Find the album art in Amazon and add to the data

At the end, you then at least have the album and track names in you MediaMonkey library - searchable, sortable etc. The custom fields tells you where it is.

You do not have the actual music on the computer but at least you know where to go find it (and where to put it back)

I am considering this but just don't want to "hand tag" all that data. Maybe someone can up with an automated solution perhaps getting data from a Vinyl web site or other site.