Tuesday, 26 February 2008
12:21 AM
Upon hearing about my early experiments in converting vinyl to digits, Michael B said that the device to use was an ART USB Phone Plus Interface (v2), an instance of which he sent me. It's an external box that takes phono (or other) RCA or optical input, optionally runs it through a preamp, and runs it out a USB port. It's got an onboard gain adjust so you can modulate just how saturated you want the signal to be when it gets to the computer.
Packaged with the device is a copy of Audacity, which is GNU-licensed software that you can use to record and then manipulate.
So, onward. I did an experiment with Steely Dan's "Gaucho," which gave me a feel for adjusting the incoming volume and for working with Audacity. The process itself is as straightforward as can be, once you've sorted out that Audacity needs to get its input from the USB port.
Have a listen:
Steely Dan - Hey, Nineteen (clip) [1:10, 1 MB]
The test might be somewhat biased inasmuch as Steely Dan took considerable trouble to make excellent-quality analog recordings. Still, sounds ok. Encouraging.
After experimenting with this, it was time to get the production line going. I began by recording individual tracks, stopping and cleaning them up (Audacity has a good tool for removing clicks and pops), and then recording the next track. I was advised that it would be more efficient to record an entire side at once, then chop up the big file into individual tracks.
Problem. After some time, anywhere from 4 minutes to 14 minutes, the track would go haywire, like this:
There was no clear pattern other than that this problem was consistent enough that I couldn't do the thing of recording a whole side. I pinged Michael B, who's been thru all this before, and he advised a slew of things to try. This included not running the USB thru a hub, and going directly into the motherboard; shutting everything down while I was recording; moving the temp file to a non-system disk; and making sure I wasn't trying to record at better than 16-bit, aka CD quality.
I tried this tonight, using as an experiment a 23-some-minute classical piece. It worked great -- the recording finished (250 MB .wav file in the end). If this is a real fix (fixes), I'm ready to start the long slog of working thru the crate of LPs.
Which does bring up another aspect of all this, which is that unlike ripping CDs, recording LPs is in real time. 23 minutes of an LP takes 23 minutes to record, gah. And as noted, I can't really be doing anything else on the computer at the same time. I could probably count up the LPs and calculate how many hours of my life I'm going to be spending on this.
Oddly (or maybe not), however, there's also a twinge of nostalgia. For those of a certain age, a popular activity in our youth was recording LPs ... onto cassette tapes. This is surprisingly similar. All the way down to making sure no one is horsing around in the office while you're recording (no skipping!), a problem that one likewise doesn't face when ripping CDs.
And there is the problem that I haven't in such a long time ... the cat jumping on the turntable mid-recording. A retro-techno-problem that's not actually covered in the Audacity troubleshooting page.
[categories]
technology, personal
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