Vinyl, Part 2 - mike's web log/comments

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February 26, 2008 | Vinyl, Part 2 | 2539 hit(s)

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.

John 26 Feb 08 - 12:48 AM

I used a Mac with the Ion deck, but just because I had no USB issues doesn't mean that Macs are better than PCs. Mostly it's the design, build and OS that make them better.

But anyway, Audacity is occasionally a bit mad, but it does let you record a 33 rpm LP at 45 rpm and then slow it down in software.

Maybe worth testing to see if you can hear the difference. When converting my mother's dire collection of "music" it made no discernible change.

arkaytee 26 Feb 08 - 10:08 AM

Funny that you just wrote about this. My fiance just finished blogging about needing to get his LPs digitized, too :)

http://poptopiaparkway.blogspot.com/2008/02/pretentious-treatise-on-art-of-mix-tape.html

mike 26 Feb 08 - 10:10 AM

Wow, that's an interesting idea. Some number of the LPs that I'll convert are old (old, old) mono recordings, and I'm sure that the strategy you suggest would work great with them. I'd be a little leery of doing this with, say, classical recordings, but it's worth a try! I could save ... lessee ... 25% of my life!*

* Any information provided in this blog under the general definition of "math" is not warranted to be correct, logical, or useful. Alas.

Lon 26 Feb 08 - 8:26 PM

Glad my fiance turned me onto your blog. Regarding your latest entry, I can't tell you how much I'd like to digitize my vinyl - the LPs to some degree, but primarily to capture many of my 45s.

Good to hear an example audio clip. Is your conversion project running smooth? Are you sold on the equipment you have now?

mike 26 Feb 08 - 8:48 PM

>Is your conversion project running smooth? Are you sold on the equipment you have now?

So far so good. It's time consuming, but now that I can in fact record a side at a time, I can at least walk away from it for a while while it's doing its thing.

I ran across my first example today of the click/pop eliminator being too aggressive -- I'd recorded something that featured some sharp snare-drum hits, and the click/pop filter squashed those. I had to go back and listen to the original to figure out why it sounded weird. Word to the wise, I guess.

I have found that Adobe Audition is perhaps a better program in terms of reducing crackle and hiss, but Audacity does a decent job for most purposes. It's only when I want to go all audiophile that I fire up the big unit (ie, Audition).