Recording LPs etc to CD

parsi

A friend has a collection of LPs which he would like to record onto CD. What is the best way to do this - is there a commercial service out there which will do it or suitable gizmo's ?

A simple easy-to-use solution would be best (i.e. not just using hooking up the turntable to the mic input on a laptop and recording using sound recorder etc).

liquid-steel

I presume the record-player that you are going to use got phono outputs ?
If so , buy a Stereo Phono to 3.5mm Lead , plug it from the record player outputs into the LINE-IN of your soundcard .

Under your Audio Properites , set LINE-IN as your recording input.

There is loads of software on the web for recording audio etc , a lot of them have 30day trials etc . Here is one http://www.polderbits.com/ that gives a 2 week 'no limitations' trial period.

The Daddy of these is probably SoundForge http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/download/step2.asp?DID=461 .
It will also contain filters to remove cliks/pops/hiss generated from records.

30 Day trial period, but a bit complicated for what you want to do .

Software such as those above will let you record to WAV files (select 16bit 44Khz Stereo) or MP3 (the higher bitrate the better)which then in turn can be burnt to CD to create an Audio CD.

Have fun ..

musician.ie

You'll definitely benefit by using specialised software to do this. I think sound forge might be overkill, as it's a jack of all trades in the audio field. Magix have a lovely package which is also cheap, built from the ground up to do exactly what you want.:

Audio Cleaning Lab

It will do a good job removing noise, clicks and pops. And has many other tricks such as EQ up it's sleeve. I used it to clean up a spoken word cassette recorded 30 years ago on one of those brick shaped mono recorders with a low quality cassette. After spending a bit of time setting it up it gave me excellent results. If you use it on good quality vinyl played on a decent Hi-Fi, your CDs should be pristine.

derrie

Using the record deck in a line in won't work because the phono level is far lower than line level and requires a seperate earth lead you'd need to use a phono pre-amp of some description (usually integrated into hi-fi or DJ mixers)

parsi

Thanks for the advice folks..

Civilian_Target

Plug your preamped phono into the line-in of your computer. Record through the line in. You can capture it using a program such as Audacity (free from sf.net) or Nero Audio Editor that comes with every copy of Nero. At this point, if you want to clean out hiss, run a noise gate on the input. Then go to burn it with Nero and in the properties area of the track, insert seperators were you want the tracks to start and finish. And burn. Voilla.

It works time after time for me.

musician.ie

Civilian_Target's advice will get you a pretty good result, and for free too. It won't be an optimal solution though. The noise gate won't take out clicks and pops. It will just completely silence the audio when it drops below a certain volume threshold ( i.e. periods of hissy silence. The noise reduction facility in the audio restoration package I mentioned works by taking a profile of what should be silence in your audio chain. It then uses this profile to *subtract* the hiss from the rest of the signal. If set up well, it'll do a far better job.

No diss intended, Civilian_Target . I've tried several approaches including yours and just found I got better results with the magix package.

ST

Check out this thread on the same subject.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=55522