Magic and Lies

So, at this point, we have set up our equipment and cleaned the record – now to capture that music and digitise it!

The output from the record deck will need amplifying before it gets to the PC. This may come as a surprise to anyone who has set up a mid range hi-fi, those amplifiers carry a separate circuit to deal with record players.

I use the ART accessories USB Phono plus – this is extremely simple to set up, phono connections out to the sound card (1 Nikkai Stereo 3.5mm Jack to Twin Phono Lead), or USB connection out to the PC, select Phono and Flat output on front panel and adjust output to the top end of the green signal – it should flicker red on loud passages. Solid red will result in the signal being clipped and the recording compromised.

If the equipment is properly set up, you should be able to hear the output coming though the PC sound system. We now need to use some software to capture the signal. Art Accessories kindly package Audacity with the pre-amp, however Audacity is fiddly to use, particularly when it comes to splitting the tracks.

I use Vinyl Studio, available from AlpineSoft – this excellent utility allows you to capture the signal from the LP, store it as two .wav files (one for each side), filter any scratches, clicks and pops, and finally split the two files into individual tracks. It will also retrieve song titles from the internet!

First job is to create a project and an album in Vinyl Studio – this sets up a directory structure for the recorded files.

Creating an Album

Create the project using the file – New menu, then in the ‘Record’ tab, select ‘Prepare to record a new album’.

Fill in the Artist and Title – take care as it will use the content here to search for the track titles.

Click on ‘Create Album’.

The next step is to check levels. Again, we don’t want to overload the signal.

Checking Levels

Note that the software has worked out that we’re using the USB Audio codec to digitise the analogue audio stream. It is a feature, so I’m told, that certain devices are listed as microphones – the Art Accessories USB plus being one!

Adjust the volume from the USB plus (preamp) until the peaks are registering red, but not butting up against the top of the scale. This is quite fiddly with some records – set the level on the loudest part. Also be aware that back in the seventies, mastering technology was not what it is today, so it’s not unusual to find two sides of the same record mastered at different volumes – set the level for each side to be sure of getting the best results.

Finally we’re ready to go – select record, place the needle on the record and move on to the ‘Split Tracks’ tab while the music is being digitised. Here you can send the software off to retrieve the track listing from a variety of sources, chosen from a drop down list. Again, be careful as different editions of a record may have extra tracks. You can also fill in the track listing by hand. Once this is done, return to the ‘Record’ tab, when the record ends, hit stop, flip the disk and repeat the process.

Once we have the LP digitised, then we need to split the tracks. Remember we currently have one huge .WAV file for each side of the album. Return to the ‘Split Tracks’ tab.

Splitting the Tracks

In this screen, hit ‘Scan for Trackbreaks’ – the software will make a pretty reasonable stab at finding the breaks between tracks – it will warn you if you have more breaks than tracks, or less – if this happens, chances are you have a quiet passage which has been mistaken for a track break – simply locate it in the graph and delete the break. This is made simple, by being able to play the track from the software – just put the pointer in the place you think may be mistaken for a break (you can zoom in on the graph), and press play.

If you accept the default sensitivity settings, you will find it gets 90% of track breaks right, but will need adjusting to deal with fade outs. Same principle as above – navigate to the beginning of the fade out and press play, then move the beginning of the break to the place where the music becomes inaudible.

In the next tab, we can clean up the audio – you can utilise the automatic scan which locates every pop, crackle and click on the record and zaps it, or you can painstakingly locate each audible blemish and zap it – your choice!

So now we take the final step – converting our two large files into several smaller ones. nothing easier! Select the ‘Album’ menu (top of the screen) and choose ‘Save Tracks as MP3′ or ‘Save Tracks as WAV’.

Personally I choose to save the tracks as WAV, on the basis that I can then convert them into FLAC for Hi-Fi and MP3 for mobile listening, later. That will be the topic of the next article!

After many false starts, blind alleys etc, I think I’ve more or less got this sorted so – this post and several more will attempt to document the exact process, hardware and software used to create high quality digital audio files from vinyl.

The Hardware

• VP1 Record Cleaner
• Technics SL 1210 MkII Turntable
• ART Accessories USB Phono plus
• 1 Nikkai USB A to USB B Cable
• 1 Nikkai Stereo 3.5mm Jack to Twin Phono Lead
• 1 Soundblaster Live! Sound Card
• Dell Dimension PC 256mb Memory
• Altec Lansing Multimedia Speakers

Software

• Vinyl Studio (www.alpinesoft.co.uk)
• dbPowerAmp Music Converter

Most of the hardware I already owned – but I heed the words of a wise old sound engineer from my DJ’ing days – ‘Garbage in, Garbage out’ he would mutter, as I insisted on soundchecking the newest Alien Sex Fiend 12 inch… he had a point, though it took me quite a while to appreciate it.

The VP1 record cleaner is therefore first on the list. You might think £450 is a lot to pay for a record cleaner, but this device is the closest thing to magic I’ve come across – the secret is in the vacuuming, using conventional bristle or cloth cleaners on a recored simply moves the dust around or worse, pushes it deep into the grooves. Unless a record is actually scratched, this device will pretty much restore vinyl to its original condition. As an ex DJ, much of my vinyl is severely manhandled, nightclubs are not the most vinyl friendly environment, so this device is worth it’s considerable weight in gold.

The Technics SL1210 is similarly a souvenir of the DJ’ing days – still the turntable of choice in the DJ’ing trade due to extreme robustness and simplicity – you simply can’t go wrong with a deck of this quality.

Art Accessories USB Phono+ is the pre-amp that the record player requires to amplify the signal enough to make it usable. This handy device is very straightforward to set up – connect the deck to the inputs, the outputs to your sound card using the Nikkai Stereo 3.5mm Jack to Twin Phono Lead, which takes stereo output from the Technics into a single stereo input for your soundcard. The Device can be powered from the USB port of the PC.

The Art Accessories product comes with a music editing package called Audacity. This I found to be effective, but tedious to use. I elected to use Vinyl Studio instead, for the simple reason that Vinyl Studio will estimate the track breaks, edit out the ‘thump’ of the needle dropping and download the track listing from amazon if it’s available. The reason this is important is that recording the vinyl gives you two humongous .wav files – one for each side. These need to be split into individual tracks before converting to the format of your choice. Vinyl Studio outputs to .wav and .mp3 only. This is where dbPowerAmp Music converter earns it’s crust.

That explains the components – next post will start detailing the process.