Digital music forum: What's the simplest way I can convert vinyl records to MP3s?

The Line Out is designed to send the audio to another device for processing (often recording). It takes one more variable out of the recording process -- the volume control. You can plug it directly into any Line In input on any sound card to record the albums. You probably already have an amplifier that has that output on it -- often it's on a Tape 1 connection. All you would need is an adapter to go from the RCA plugs on a standard audio cable (that you can get from a connection to a tape deck) to a 1/8 in mini jack to plug into the sound card. The RadioShack® Y-Adapter, Phono Jacks to Stereo 1/8" Plug Model: 274-269, is perfect for this and available through your local Radio Shack.

There are many step-by-step directions here, so I won't duplicate their efforts.

I also agree that when you record, use a WAV format and then process as needed to make the MP3 files. Seriously consider saving the WAV files for some time, too, so if your dad finds the MP3 compression format you chose to be too harsh, you can easily re-do the processing to a better sounding (i.e. higher bit rate) compression .

Best of Luck!

I have used DAK, both programs and equipment (connecting my turntable to computer, with volumn control etc. However, they also have a turntable with built in equipment for even better results (next on my list of purchases) Cleans up sound, including most scratches and, has lots of other benefits. (e.g. was able to record my 78's and 45's at higher speeds and automatically adjust the high pitch to normal, all hands off. Also have no connection with DAK, other than as a satisfied customer. Best wishes; can't think of a better gift for your Dad.

Gloria, some very good information has already been posted and your head must be spinning from it all.
Some one already had mentioned the www.dak.com web site. I have purchased their turntable with included software a couple of years ago and couldn't be happier with the purchase. All of his products are of excellent quality and work flawlessly. In addition the site includes all the necessary helpful and hand holding information and tutorials that you will need to be successful. Even if you don't purchase his product the web site has a lot of informative help on the subject.

I remember, years ago, when I was buying and collecting all that vinyl, it was SO important to have good quality equipment, especially the turntable and cartridge. Now, after all these years, people are bragging about how well a $39 USB turntable works. I couldn't get even a cheap cartridge for under a hundred bucks and a decent turntable nowadays can run into the thousands. Maybe the reason cheap equipment sounds so acceptable is because a digital recording can't compete with the sound of the original analog run through good equipment. I guess if the final result has no chance to sound as good as the original, it doesn't matter if you use cheap equipment. Now, I know some poster are going to tell me I'm full of baloney, but think about it...why do some popular recordings still get released on vinyl for the serious collectors?

... buying one of those new(ish) turntables that can play an album and store the digitized audio files on a USB stick or CD/DVD. Done. The audio files could be in MP3, WAV or a number of other formats.

Well, you may then want to edit the metadata in the MP3 files, organize/sort the tracks into a specific sequence, etc.

Or you may want to do some serious editing to improve sound quality and so on - but as I am saying ths we are stepping away from the "simple" way. So, let's leave that for now.

If you want to do this with your computer you need a few things. The computer needs the sound connectors - typically 'microphone in', 'line in' and 'speaker, headphone or line out'. If it doesn't already have these you can get a 'sound card' for a desktop computer or the corresponding device for a USB connection for a laptop. We will use the 'line in' connection. Your typical turntable will have a magnetic pickup and can't drive the 'line in' connection unassisted. (It could drive the 'microphone in' connection, but it would be missing all the bass. So don't go there.)

There are two ways to get around this. One is to buy a small gadget called a phono preamp(lifier) - its job is to amplify the sound level from the phono cartridge to the 'line in' level and also to increase the bass level which was reduced before cutting the phono record in order to save space for the grooves. (Long story - do ask if you are interested ...) If you buy one of these get one that can run on batteries, it will save you lots of hassles with humming noises that are quite likely to drive you nuts - they can be brought under control, but using batteries is much easier ...

The other way is to use the stereo system that your turntable is connected to - it has a built in phono preamp that you can use. The only correct way to connect this to your 'line in' connector on the computer is via a 'pre-out' or 'tape monitor' set of outlets on the amplifier. If you were to use the speaker or headphone connectors your sound level would be way too high and so probably would be distortions.

In both cases you may still pick up some 'digital noise' - if you do, get expert help.

Once you have made all the connections you can start recording. That is, you could if you had software for this. My suggestion is to download a program called Audacity (it is free and pretty powerful and in my opinion not too hard to operate.)

Download it, study the documentation (really, this time. This is probably not intuitive enough for our usual approach and install the software. Then start the software, start playing an album, and start recording. If all is well you can see the sound levels of the two stereo channels flickering. In that case adjust the levels as high as possible without going over the top. Then, without stopping the recording , restart the album, play the complete first side and again without stopping the recording turn the record around and play side B. After that is finished stop the recording and learn enough about editing to cut off the unwanted bits in the beginning, the end and the middle portion where you turned the record around.

Now would be a good time to edit for sound quality - eliminating hiss, hum and scratches. But that goes beyond 'simple', so we'll leave it for now. At this point you can also cut the whole recording into individual tracks, in case you want to form different collections from these tracks. .

If you recorded to WAV format (like I would) you could now burn audio CDs from this. Or you could convert to MP3 and download to an MP3 player.

From here there are many options and alternatives to get the results just like you want them. But the main pieces are all here in the above.

A few obvious things: Use a good turntable, place it on a solid level surface, make sure the stylus is reasonably new and right for the disks you are playing. Use decent quality cables (no monster cables required) of moderate length. If the records had usually been played "wet" it is best to continue to do so for the recording.

Enjoy! It is a long and sometimes tedious process, but it can be quite rewarding if the results are good.

A USB turntable plugs into a USB port, of which most computers nowadays have many. Most have far fewer audio jacks on the sound card. If you want simplicity, go with the USB.

I use Audacity. It works great. It has a bit of a learning curve, but nothing too difficult.

Download Audacity (here) and install it. I think the only change I made to the Audacity Preferences was to change Recording > Recording > Channels to '2 (Stereo)'. Keep 'Quality at 44100 Hz in the (slim) case you'll ever want to make a CD. You will also have to download the latest Lame MP3 encoder, which is free to the user but Audacity can't include it for free - see the release notes for instructions.

The first thing you have to do is hook up a turntable to your computer. My turntable has a set of RCA cables that plug into my amplifier, but these don't have a strong enough signal to drive the soundcard (or sound input) in a computer, so I use another set of RCA cables from the SIGNAL OUT on the amp to my computer AUX IN connections. I use a 2-RCA-cable-to-stereo-phone plug adapter at the computer. Audacity website has tutorials on how to set it up and how to hook up your computer, here.

Now, with a record playing I can hear it through the computer speakers. Cue a song on your turntable, and hit the record button. When the song finishes I never 'Save' it, as saving is to a proprietary Audacity format. I Export as a MP3. When you do that, there is a drop down asking for the bit-rate you'd like to use - select at least 128, more being better. Then it asks you to enter metadata, like artist, track title and more.

Once you figure it out had have it working, the biggest hassle is cueing up and listening to all those songs one at a time. BUT, if you want to, you can copy the whole side of a LP in one go: After you've recorded it all, look at how long the songs are and then at the waveform. You'll find flat spots in the waveform at the timing marks for the song. That is, if the first song it 3 minutes, there'll be a flat waveform at 3 minutes.

First I delete any extra time or sound at the beginning of the recording. Then I click to delete everything after the end of the first song, and then Export it as a MP3. Then I Undo the Delete, and delete from there (the end of the first song) to the beginning. Now the recording starts at the 2nd song. Find the 'flat' spot at the end of the 2nd song, and delete to the end of the recording - Save as MP3, undo what you deleted, delete from there to the beginning (that is, delete the 2nd song). Rinse, lather repeat until all songs are saved. It sounds klutzy, but makes sense as you do it.

Again, there are tutorials on the Audacity website. There are also several videos on youtube explaining Audacity.

Good luck.

Hi Gloria. I was faced with the same task, not for my old father, but for myself (and I am an old father and grandfather). First, I bought a Numark record player with a USB connection. I wasn't satisfied with the sound quality, but found that I needed a better pick-up which then cost a bit more than the record player (about $200). Then I installed the EZ Audio Converter software which came with the record player but can also be downloaded. All that needs to be done is to connect the record player to the computer (I use a MacBookAir, but that doesn't matter), play the record and start recording. I set the entry volume to max and de-activate the automatic "new song" between numbers (it creates new songs whenever there is a small pause in the music, e.g. before the final "Halleluja" in Messiah). The software can automatically save the music to iTunes if you so desire. One additional note: I also tried the software "Golden Records" but was deeply disappointed. The sound quality was lousy wheres the quality I get with EZ Audio Converter is amazing. Fantastic feeling to be able to listen to my favorite old vinyls in my car. Good luck.

Hi. You're going to need a turntable, an audio (wav) editor so that you can record the input and cut it into separate tracks, and a piece of software to convert the tracks from wav to mp3. Assuming you have a computer, the turntable is the only purchase you might have to make.

I have a turntable made for a stereo system that's not part of any other piece of equipment. There are two ways to use one of these, connect it to your stereo and connect the line-out from your stereo to your computer, or connect it directly to the line-in on your computer. If you connect it directly to your computer, you'll need some piece of software called a turntable equalizer that will equalize the RIAA curve. That sounds techie, but it's really simple. The way the music is written on the LP compresses one end of the frequency to reduce distortion. To listen to the LP sound naturally, the music needs to be decompressed. Many audio editors have an RIAA normalization option. If you don't have a home stereo type of turntable, but buy a USB turntable that plugs into your computer's USB port, it probably has it built in to its software. Beware of all-in-one packaged hardware that has a turntable, cassette player, and a CD burner. I helped my neighbor with her music project. All three of her hardware packages were of really low quality and were returned to the vendors with a lot of hassle and dissatisfaction. Also, do not play the LP at a high speed and depend on the software to fix it. The needle and arm on the turntable won't work correctly at the very high audio frequencies that will be produced if you try it. The music will loose quality... a lot of quality.

Wav editors are available for free. I've used Audacity with very good results.

Ditto for wav to mp3 converters. I've used Lame for a long time. One thing I suggest, check the options in the converter and make sure the conversion quality is as high as you can push it. All it will take from you is a little more computer time which is easy to afford. I also like to use a very high bit rate. If I were you I would use at least 192kbs for LPs. If you can afford the disk space, consider using 256kbs.

Good luck.

Done this for years w/ different devices and software, It's a long process to seperate and name all the files. I did purchase a new Sound Blaster sound card, that is USB and came with some pretty good software for this task. The best part it has dedicated RCA inputs for a standard turntable. Nice! Good sound card, nice inputs and outputs. Does a pretty good job. Sounds good. It's all in the time you want to put into it. I have almost 1000 albums. Not done yet, not even close, but if there's one I want to convert, it doesn't take that long. Good luck.

I started with an Ion turntable like many people. I don't know how good they are but they're good enough for my purposes.

None of the programs mentioned -- like the Ion-supplied software or Audacity -- were easy enough for me to use without making this into a research project, which I don't enjoy.

I found a commercial program called "Play It Again" that was cheap enough to consider, and after a successful use of the trial version I paid the license fee. It is not a fancy program like Audacity, but it does a lot of useful stuff automatically. It has several levels of sound clean-up processing that work wonders. It does a fair job of automatic track detection, and the process of manually adjusting start-stop points for each track is easy. Like most such programs it connects to one of the online databases to find track listings. All in all I can create an MP3 directory out of an LP in the time it takes to play it plus a few minutes of fiddling.

My main complaint about the program is that the process of actually writing the MP3 files, after the fiddling is done, takes a few minutes, too long to wait for. But I just leave it running and go do something else for a while.

Good luck with your project. I've found the best part of converting a big stack of vinyl is the opportunity to listen to those old records again.

-jimc

The beauty of $79 iRecord (www.irecord.com) is that your computer does NOT have to be directly connected to your turntable - it will save the new audio file directly to a thumb drive or 2GB of internal storage. The audio file(s) can then be transferred to your computer, when you can use $29 VinylStudio (www.alpinesoft.co.uk) to automatically add album track information downloaded from the internet and also to remove clicks and pops. BTW, I like to do track-splitting myself using VinylStudio to precisely determine the start/end points of each track, since the automatic track-splitting feature is usually pretty imprecise, and can occasionally inadvertently divide a single track into multiple tracks, which is pretty annoying.

This combination has been a real winner for me, and I highly recommend both of them to all interested parties.

I use Audacity. It's a free download at .... http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

You will need some kind of connection (preferably USB) from your turntable, tuner or amp to
your computer. They have all the instructions in pdf for you to read on get it done.

Just an edit to Drivel. Input to the mic jack not the line in.

I am using EZVinyl tape converter, the software came with an ion profile LP turntable $70.00. I recommend this because ,when I was using a standard turntable jacked into an amplifier which was then jacked into a sound card I had to install into my pc. When you record Vinyl to your PC you have to listen to every bit of the music, to indicate when a song begins and ends. The EZVinyl method, the turntable plugs into the USB port of your PC. It also will separate songs automatically. It even lets me flip the record over while keeping all the song in order. It requires Itunes, Itunes will finish the process by converting the recordings to mp3. This has become a hobby of mine, I also scan the cover art and reproduce the original LP in a MP3 cd package. A lot of music fans are doing this. One last important step. I use Nero, wave editor to filter out the his and pop that is present on most old LPs. Most of the time you will get a CD quality sound. Also I record a EzVinyl records at 320 mbps. That's close to the best quality sound you can get. Good Luck...Tony