I’ve just about exhausted entering my shelves of cd’s & art to MB. I want to start submitting my 200+ lbs of vinyls & shellacs with info and art. While I’m at it, I would like to convert them to digital [either wav or flac] too. I last did this over 2 decades ago and I’m sure things have changed.
Would one or more of you be kind enough to suggest what (free) programs I should use
with a windows 10 machine and maybe the order you find best to accomplish this? I do have Audacity & EAC loaded. My turntable is a Garrard Lab 80 and I can direct wire [no bluetooth] to my computer. Hmm, seems like I vaguely remember a pre-amp? I will be washing & carbon brushing to make it a clean start. As always, your advice will be of great service to me. TTFN
I’m thinking that last time you ripped to mp3 or another lossy format?
If you ripped to a lossless format in 2000 then comparing the equipment you used then and plan to use now would be worthwhile.
If the sound-card/DAC, turntable, cartridge, stylus, media prep, cables etc are substantially the similar, then 2000 era lossless rips are likely digitally and audibly indistinguishable from what you’ll make in 2020. AIUI.
What may have changed is the soundcard/DAC. I think old 1990 soundcards did 16 bit at 48kHz. Whereas modern ones do 24 bit at 96kHz or 192kHz.
( I think some 24 bit 96kHz DACs were available prior to 2000.)
@mfmeulenbelt Both of your links are helpful, thank you. @mmirG You are right about my converting to mp3 back then. I remember always choosing the highest bit rate (fortunately). I do have a new Soundblaster card in my W10 machine. I think my turntable has the original Pickering cartridge but I need to check to see if it has a ceramic stylus. From what I’ve read so far, ceramic is a no no. I also need to find out if washing will harm the shellac records I received from my Grandfather. I will Google.
vinyl => Decent record deck => decent cables => PC with Audacity => FLAC
That is how I ave preserved various items but not yet hit the bulk of my vinyl. Did a few cassettes last year that way.
It depends on your OCD levels. But do export to the best quality your storage can handle. I know I ended up going through my 500 CDs THREE times due to initial bad choices of MP3 and then buying a new HiFi and realising how much time I had wasted. For me it is now FLAC all the way.
One trick I also do is start with less important albums first. By the time you have done the first dozen you will have changed and refined techniques.
Did you use a dedicated sound card in your PC? I haven’t considered having one for playback for over a decade, but according to that website I posted, they do matter for the recording quality.
@mfmeulenbelt I had always used whatever card came with my Windows machines. On my Windows 10 machine, I purchased this> Creative Sound Blaster Audigy FX PCIe 5.1 Sound Card with High Performance Headphone Amp. It was about $36.00 U.S. The change was dramatic through all tone ranges. There are several cards available to match whatever speaker/amp playback configuration you may have. It should also improve my input.
Llama_lover, I remember your original post as asking for
I, and possibly many other people here, would like to make all sorts of suggestions over a far wider range of issues.
For example I googled your soundcard and see that it does “24-bit 192kHz digital-to-analog converter (playback), 106dB SNR”. This is very high-quality digital-to-analog, but I’d check on what it does for “analog-to-digital” as this is what you’d be doing when you rip your vinyl.
And consider also whether you want large, very HQ, FLAC files or whether you’re happy with smaller files and lower quality.
You briefly mentioned a pre-amp.
This would/should be a phono preamp/phono stage/phono preamplifier/RIAA preamp/turntable preamp - an electronic circuit that applies the correct equalization and amplification to the signal coming from your cartridge. However it is often unknown what equalization was actually applied to any specific recording.
Which gives you license to tweak EQ settings in Audacity to your taste.
It could also be that Audacity does a good job of applying the RIAA equalisation - if so then you’re free of needing a specifically phono pre-amp.
I’m no expert on this but a couple of things I would consider. First off I’m not sure if using the computer soundcard to convert analogue to digital is the best way to go. There’s all the other electronics inside the computer which will introduce noise so a separate DAC independent of this would be the better option, kinda like Direct or Bypass mode for playing back audio through an AV Receiver.
The second thing is the format. If you RIP to WAV you can go up to 32 Bit and WAV is more an industry standard much like AIFF, whereas FLAC is 24 Bit. Keep the bitrate (more important than sample rate) and the sample rate as high as you can so 32/192. Capture at the very best you can as you can always resample it down to a 24/96 FLAC later. Then I would edit the WAV file in something like iZotope RX 7 and manually clean up any needle ticks/clicks/pops but only lightly. It’s then that I would resample down to 24/96 while in RX 7 and it should keep the quality, or if you wished keep it at 192 kHz but I feel that is unnecessarily only keeping the file size high, plus it’s more for a player to cache and decompress on the fly. Just like with bitmap image resolution you can always reduce a larger image and keep the quality but you can’t enlarge a smaller image without losing some quality.
Now I could be totally wrong here as I am not an audio engineer so hopefully someone can correct me if I’m wrong. By raising the sample rate as high as you can it then pushes the 1st wave harmonics up which are more distorted out of the range of our hearing which raises the 2nd, 3rd and 4th wave harmonics from lower down which brings in more detail and clarity. Your shifting the whole range up. This is why I think it is safe to then go and lower it after capturing the audio at the best possible quality. I believe this is also why we have higher sample rates so if you do listen to Hi Res audio and someone wants to argue that you can’t hear it, well…there’s you argument. An LP ripped and downsampled to 24/96 kHz is going to sound as good as, if not better than a CD at 16/44 kHz.
Don’t forget you will also have to split the file into individual tracks and that’s before you painstakingly fill in all the metatags and scanned album covers. It’s an immense amount of work so measure twice cut once so to speak. Buy hey…think of how you will be helping to keep older music alive for longer by digitizing it all. The music lives on and it’s a commendable thing to do…
Oh, one last thing, Shellac. I would look very carefully into the appropriate cleaning products for this. You certainly don’t want anything that is Acetone based and I’m not even sure how an Alcohol based solution would react with this. And while on cleaning you want to get right into the grooves. There are specialised cleaning machines that look like a record deck that has a tone arm and needle that feeds cleaning fluid into the grooves. ‘Groovy man’
I found the following article I thought you might find worth a read. Bare in mind it’s a little outdated but it’s not to long and it’s really well written. A very interesting read.
The page is interesting. But just saying is a myth is not really fair as @carV3 just said that is equally good sounding.
Or you could add that saying CD sounds better is a myth, because the content has to be well done for being better.
Myth is not good chosen word.
It’s subjective.
Or we could say old vinyl sound better than CD because, at first, CD sounded metallic (vinyls obviously sounded warmer, which is better for some) and nowadays, music is over compressed (at such a high level that was only used for radio play).
Oh gawd the noise wars. I’m so glad I grew up in an era when music was music to my ears. Listening to some David Crosby right now as I type. The production side of things and how the music is made is one of the most important factors and dynamic compression has done us no favours. Music is very subjective on so many different levels.
chaban has missed the point and seems to think it’s an argument over LP verses CD when it’s not. I listen to rips from CD, Cassette Tape, Reel to Reel, Vinyl or even purely digital from start to finish produced at a high quality from the source right through to the end of production. Chesky Records has some great stuff, Stockfisch too. But you take an old LP which was recorded on equipment by today’s standards could be classed as inferior and also in how modern day playback equipment interprets it. We can actually improve on the original by capturing it at a higher quality and then reducing it back down to remove some of that noise so it sounds better. In the same way that hi end audio gear can show up imperfections the same applies to an old shellac record designed to be heard on an old Gramophone played back on bob standard consumer based modern day audio equipment with all it’s electronics.
After reading the “compleat guide” that @carV3 linked, I downloaded a trial copy of Vinyl Studio and after one LP, I’m sold. I had been using Audacity but this is way easier, being very targeted to the specific purpose of transferring analog music (vinyl or tape) to digital. It will even lookup track titles from MB once you enter artist name and album title. I’ll still need to run the tracks through Picard for full tagging but that doesn’t take long.
As always, your advice will be of great service to me. TTFN
But do export to the best quality your storage can handle. I know I ended up going through my 500 CDs THREE times due to initial bad choices of MP3 and then buying a new HiFi and realising how much time I had wasted. For me it is now FLAC all the way.