I had 400 - 500 LPs, about 150 45RPMs, and then inherited about 100 - 200
more LPs when my mother died!
Two preliminaries ...
First, popular music, in particular, dates very quickly. Generally only a
tiny percentage from any era is worth keeping. Even allowing for the fact
that my era - late 60s/early 70s - was a particularly creative time for pop,
the number of pop CDs from all eras that I still want to keep in their
entirety is probably about 50 or less, the remaining albums just had
isolated good tracks. Realising this more than halved my problem.
"If a job's worth doing at all, it's worth doing it well" is a saying to
bear in mind when planning digitising vinyls. Obviously, you have to record
the tracks in real time, but the time spent digitally editing the wave files
to remove scratches is usually far more significant. It's an *extremely*
time-consuming process to do well. You need to think how to reduce the
workload.
My advice is:
1) Listen critically through the entire collection, and classify them as
to whether:
a) Outgrown them, can live without them now
Give to a charity shop, etc ...
b) Want a small number of tracks
As you go along, gather them into a track list: you might be able to d'load
the individual tracks from legal sources, illegal mp3 sharers, or ngs, or
else copy them from local library CDs, etc.
c) Like most or all of the album
As you go along, gather them into an album list: start trawling through
shops and web sites of Virgin, HMV, etc for reduced "3 for £18" offers, and
the like; also look for compilations that would make a significant enough
dent in the track list to be worthwhile, eg: so-and-so's Greatest Hits may
contain all or nearly all the tracks that you actually want of that artist.
I've replaced a significant section of my collection cheaply this way.
2) Hopefully the above will reduce the workload to a relatively small
selection of tracks plus the odd deleted entire vinyl - as long as you're
not interested in the much-deleted British folk music of the 70s and 80s,
the lists shouldn't be too long. Concentrate your efforts on them.
Points to note about the digitising process itself ...
You can't just plug the phono output from an avaerage deck directly into the
line in of the average sound card because a) the phono signal level is far
too low and b) vinyl recordings are pre-compensated to suit the medium, and
must be corrected on playback. You need either a conventional hifi amp with
a designated phono input, a deck with an in-built phono-pre-amp (and
therefore a line out rather than a phono out connection), or a separate
phono pre-amp. You can then connect the line out of your hifi amp, deck, or
pre-amp to the line in of the sound card.
As a general rule it is better to under-use rather than over-use automated
digital processing. In particular, software claiming to remove vinyl
scratches 'automatically' is at best often over-hyped and at worst,
especially in the hands of the unskilled, more unpleasant in result than the
original scratches. If you set such software to find or mark 'scratches' it
will often erroneously find normal peaks in the music, the implication being
that if you set the software to remove such 'scratches' automatically it
will inevitably to some extent corrupt the original music by treating such
peaks as though they are scratches. At the other extreme, if you choose
software that will allow you to remove scratches by hand you could remove
every tiny little one manually and so get the best result that it is
possible to get, but you might be on your deathbed by the time you finish
the LP! So my advice would be to compromise: at least do the major
scratches, the ones that are individually audible when listening to the
album, by hand, and only run the automatic removal tools after you've done
as much manually as you feel able. This enables the automatic tools to be
run at a level correspondingly reduced in severity with correspondingly more
faithful results. This should enable you to remove all the audible
scratches, to reduce the vinyl 'wear' noise to an acceptable level, and if
necessary to remove 'rumble', without tearing the guts out of the sound.
PS: FWIW I use DCart 5 to remove scratches manually and rumble
automatically, and Sound Forge's Click and Crackle removal for auto removal
of vinyl 'wear', but they're both quite expensive.
"McQz@Work" <mcqz@cableone.net> wrote in message
news:10ispa5apqq6h25@corp.supernews.com...
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