7 ms·

Sample workflow for LP digitization

100 points by dirwiz 10y ago

minikites 10y ago
To those who would ask "why rip vinyl instead of getting the CD?", there are lots and lots of records that never made it to CD.
- jeffbr13 10y ago
  "lots of records that never made it to CD" is a great phrase! Of course we're still stuck using the lingo created at the start of the recording industry boom of the twentieth century, much as we're likely to continue saying "disk drive" although we've already moved away from spinning rust. Many records are still never released on anything apart from vinyl. Many subcultures in music have returned to/continued releasing on that medium for aesthetic or commercial reasons: most often it's either to encourage physical DJing, the relationship with the music as an artefact, or because exclusivity makes business sense.
  - hnhg 10y ago
    Great comment. You need only Google "vinyl only 2016" or any other year to see how relatively common this is.
- abrowne 10y ago
  And lately I see a lot of special editions and "bonus" tracks only on vinyl.
- lucideer 10y ago
  There are also other relatively compelling reasons around quality. And I'm not referring to the idea that vinyl is an inherently better quality format than CD, but rather that many[0] actual pressings have been mastered in higher quality in practice. [0] http://dr.loudness-war.info/ http://dr.loudness-war.info/
  - intopieces 10y ago
    I'm firmly in the camp that mourns the victims of the loudness war, but it's important to keep in mind that "quality" is not something that can objectively measured, and every generation has its own perception of it. In MP3: The Meaning of a Format by Jonathan Sterne, he cites research done on "The MP3 generation" -- people who came of age when Napster was on the rise -- that found those listeners preferred the sound of 128kbps MP3 over any other format or bit rate. The technology of encoding created an aesthetic. And then of course you have Brian Eno: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
    - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
      Eno was dead wrong about that. Outside of a marginal Kickstarter project - probably for a Japanese fanbase - I don't think anyone is going to pay money for a high-jitter 12-bit resolution retro CD player. Comparing that to the stylised imperfections of a human performer is unconvincing. I do think there's an interesting effect where as soon as a first-to-market technology becomes good enough to avoid being hopelessly terrible, its characteristic flaws set standard expectations for a medium. Hence retro anything - guitars, synthesizers, cars, recording equipment, tapes, vinyl, paperback books, computers... How likely is it that the early designers were so awesome they hit a technological bullseye with these things - apparently almost every single time anyone developed a new technology? I can't quite believe that's how it works. Personally I have no love at all for the sound of vinyl, even on stratospherically expensive hardware.
      - JonnieCache 10y ago
chiph 10y ago
I didn't see it mentioned, but I wonder if Audacity inverts the RIAA equalization curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
- keithpeter 10y ago
  You are right, there is no mention of the turntable/stylus/preamplifier configuration at all. I would guess that the Audacity people assume that people would be using a turntable plugged into a preamplifier with RIAA equilisation built in. http://midimagic.sgc-hosting.com/mixphono.htm http://midimagic.sgc-hosting.com/mixphono.htm History before the 1950s is complex. Audacity has provision for defining a frequency response curve and applying that curve to a project.
  - doublerebel 10y ago
    Really surprised they left out those details. Needles have a huge impact on the frequency curve, a lot of standard club needles are bass heavy and/or sacrifice fidelity for tracking. And on the digital side the ADC makes a noticeable difference. Plus is it isolated from the other circuitry, particularly power supplies? Ripping vinyl takes enough work, it's worth knowing the few details that make the effort worthwhile.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    As bondaburrah points out in the sibling comment, there are probably no consumer sound cards in existence that would be able to record a non-preamplified vinyl recording. So the RIAA equalisation issue is moot.
    - jestar_jokin 10y ago
      Yes, there are. Any sound card that supports XLR connector mics will probably support phantom power and have a built-in mic amp, a vinyl pre-amp is not much different. I use an E-MU 1212m with a microdock, making it equivalent to a 1616m, which offers a "Turntable Input (w/ground lug and hardware RIAA preamp)". http://www.creative.com/emu/products/product.aspx?pid=19007 http://www.creative.com/emu/products/product.aspx?pid=19007
hardwaresofton 10y ago
While I have no need of ripping vinyl, just wanted to say that Audacity is one of the best examples of indispensable FOSS (when it comes to working with sound) that I have ever come across in my life. I remember I was using it well over 7 years ago, and was in awe of how much power it gave me for free, and how capable of a tool it was. Couldn't donate then, but definitely can now. While I know my time/PRs might be more valuable, regular money will have to do.
- schlowmo 10y ago
  Word! I just like to add that it's especially indispensable for many community radios across the world. Maybe there are more powerful tools out there (FOSS or not), but I never saw an audio tool with such capabilities which people got used to so quickly like they do with Audacity. The absolutely perfect fit for those community radios where almost everything has to be self-taught.
- PepeGomez 10y ago
  Has the conversion to 16bit been fixed? Dithering still wasn't working properly the last time I checked.
don_loemax 10y ago
As a club DJ who selects and plays in a digital format now, I like to leave clicks and pops in when digitizing my "white-labels" or vinyl-exclusive releases (some of the best or most coveted tunes are released on vinyl first in very small runs, months before they are available as downloads). I like to normalize then run the recording through Izotope's Ozone 7 on the "warm and transparent" preset to get it closer in loudness to digital releases I am mixing them with. There is a small community of us who share rips of this type of release from around the world, online, as the best place to pick a lot of this kind of record up is in smaller local genre-specific shops. Black Market soho in London was a Mecca of mine or Rooted Records in Bristol but I live in Cali now and have a hard time keeping up my share ratio but still get a rush when I get a great vinyl rip of a tune earlier than most. It is silly and matters very little to my livelihood but an old tradition in dj'ing that I am glad still survives (having tracks the next Dj doesn't, that is).
- ams6110 10y ago
  Why is this done? Tradition? Certainly it's an extra expense that releasing in pure digital format would not include -- and it's not like all the music is not mastered digitally now anyway -- nobody is mastering on tape and cutting and splicing....
  - rfrank 10y ago
    White labels and dubplates in general hearken back to the sound system culture that originated in Jamaica [1]. Mostly a means of getting the newest songs fastest; record something in the morning, press your dubplate that afternoon, play it out that night. The unofficial nature of the recordings makes it easier to hop around copyright stuff and not clear samples, etc. The song Alicia by Mala jumps to mind [2], I don't think it's ever seen a proper release because of the heavy use of Alicia Keys samples. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_system_%28Jamaican%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_system_%28Jamaican%29 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpV7radKuwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpV7radKuwo
    - ams6110 10y ago
kadavy 10y ago
A less technical, step-by-step way (also using Audacity) http://transfermymusic.com/vinyl-to-cd-or-mp3/ http://transfermymusic.com/vinyl-to-cd-or-mp3/
anexprogrammer 10y ago
When I rip vinyl I want as little processing as possible, so no messing around with high pass and pop removal. If it's new or decent condition vinyl the pops and hiss will be barely audible anyway. Far more important to have a decent MC cartridge, and make sure it goes through a decent phono (RIAA) stage, which generally means an older hifi amp, or not-cheap hifi component. Any phono stage of the last 20 years, or the "rip your old records" turntables generally use lowest quality crap going.
- TylerE 10y ago
  Eh, there are tons of EXCELLENT and not-very-expensive modern phono stages. Just avoid DJ stuff
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    Why avoid DJ stuff? Isn't a Technics deck going to be better than your run of the mill USB vinyl "recorder"?
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    I guess it depends where you place "not very expensive", £100-200 will get you a good hifi preamp phono stage with MC/MM. You can pay far more if you want silly esoterica. It's not very far removed from the quality that would typically come "free" with a decent mid-market older preamp.
    - TylerE 10y ago
      Not just older amps can have good built-ins. Perviously I was running a standalone phono stage (Can't remember the exact model offhand, but it was $250 or so - solid, well reviewed component.) I upgrade to a Rega Brio amp about 2 years ago which has a built in phono stage that was even better.
Animats 10y ago
Of course, the real way to do this is to optically scan the record and simulate a stylus tracking it. The Library of Congress does this.[1] They've even recovered records broken into pieces, by scanning the pieces and reassembling the 3D model. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/how-a-machine-in-the-basement-of-the-library-of-congress-is-saving-the-history-of-recorded-sound/372723/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/how-a-...
- coldtea 10y ago
  >the real way to do this What's "real" about it? The overwhelming majority of people doing it who are not Libraries do it with a needle.
- gfody 10y ago
  There doesn't seem to be any free or commercial software that converts high res scans of vinyl records to high quality digital audio. I remember this post from 2002 http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html where a guy posts his results with this approach, but the quality is bad and he doesn't provide source code.
voltagex_ 10y ago
I'm sad that there's no scene standard for ripping vinyls (apart from a few mentions http://scenenotice.org/details.php?id=2006 http://scenenotice.org/details.php?id=2006). I'd like to think they'd use this guide.
rdl 10y ago
Are there any services which will do this for you, given crates?
Cerium 10y ago
Years ago my dad wanted me to listen to 'the classics'. So he handed me a stack of LPs and asked if I was able to convert them into CDs for him. Of course I had to listen to each one to do a good job. I'm happy to see that the process has improved in Audacity over the years. When I used to do this there was not a good provision for adding labels to become tracks.
basicplus2 10y ago
one needs to sample the original at at least double the final finished frequency, or the finished product will have a metallic tinge to it. eg if 44,100hz rate is what you want to end up with, the sample rate needs to be at least 88,200hz.

100 points by dirwiz 10y ago

To those who would ask "why rip vinyl instead of getting the CD?", there are lots and lots of records that never made it to CD.

jeffbr13 10y ago
"lots of records that never made it to CD" is a great phrase! Of course we're still stuck using the lingo created at the start of the recording industry boom of the twentieth century, much as we're likely to continue saying "disk drive" although we've already moved away from spinning rust. Many records are still never released on anything apart from vinyl. Many subcultures in music have returned to/continued releasing on that medium for aesthetic or commercial reasons: most often it's either to encourage physical DJing, the relationship with the music as an artefact, or because exclusivity makes business sense.
- hnhg 10y ago
  Great comment. You need only Google "vinyl only 2016" or any other year to see how relatively common this is.
abrowne 10y ago
And lately I see a lot of special editions and "bonus" tracks only on vinyl.
lucideer 10y ago
There are also other relatively compelling reasons around quality. And I'm not referring to the idea that vinyl is an inherently better quality format than CD, but rather that many[0] actual pressings have been mastered in higher quality in practice. [0] http://dr.loudness-war.info/ http://dr.loudness-war.info/
- intopieces 10y ago
  I'm firmly in the camp that mourns the victims of the loudness war, but it's important to keep in mind that "quality" is not something that can objectively measured, and every generation has its own perception of it. In MP3: The Meaning of a Format by Jonathan Sterne, he cites research done on "The MP3 generation" -- people who came of age when Napster was on the rise -- that found those listeners preferred the sound of 128kbps MP3 over any other format or bit rate. The technology of encoding created an aesthetic. And then of course you have Brian Eno: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    Eno was dead wrong about that. Outside of a marginal Kickstarter project - probably for a Japanese fanbase - I don't think anyone is going to pay money for a high-jitter 12-bit resolution retro CD player. Comparing that to the stylised imperfections of a human performer is unconvincing. I do think there's an interesting effect where as soon as a first-to-market technology becomes good enough to avoid being hopelessly terrible, its characteristic flaws set standard expectations for a medium. Hence retro anything - guitars, synthesizers, cars, recording equipment, tapes, vinyl, paperback books, computers... How likely is it that the early designers were so awesome they hit a technological bullseye with these things - apparently almost every single time anyone developed a new technology? I can't quite believe that's how it works. Personally I have no love at all for the sound of vinyl, even on stratospherically expensive hardware.
    - JonnieCache 10y ago

chiph 10y ago

I didn't see it mentioned, but I wonder if Audacity inverts the RIAA equalization curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

keithpeter 10y ago
You are right, there is no mention of the turntable/stylus/preamplifier configuration at all. I would guess that the Audacity people assume that people would be using a turntable plugged into a preamplifier with RIAA equilisation built in. http://midimagic.sgc-hosting.com/mixphono.htm http://midimagic.sgc-hosting.com/mixphono.htm History before the 1950s is complex. Audacity has provision for defining a frequency response curve and applying that curve to a project.
- doublerebel 10y ago
  Really surprised they left out those details. Needles have a huge impact on the frequency curve, a lot of standard club needles are bass heavy and/or sacrifice fidelity for tracking. And on the digital side the ADC makes a noticeable difference. Plus is it isolated from the other circuitry, particularly power supplies? Ripping vinyl takes enough work, it's worth knowing the few details that make the effort worthwhile.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  As bondaburrah points out in the sibling comment, there are probably no consumer sound cards in existence that would be able to record a non-preamplified vinyl recording. So the RIAA equalisation issue is moot.
  - jestar_jokin 10y ago
    Yes, there are. Any sound card that supports XLR connector mics will probably support phantom power and have a built-in mic amp, a vinyl pre-amp is not much different. I use an E-MU 1212m with a microdock, making it equivalent to a 1616m, which offers a "Turntable Input (w/ground lug and hardware RIAA preamp)". http://www.creative.com/emu/products/product.aspx?pid=19007 http://www.creative.com/emu/products/product.aspx?pid=19007

hardwaresofton 10y ago

While I have no need of ripping vinyl, just wanted to say that Audacity is one of the best examples of indispensable FOSS (when it comes to working with sound) that I have ever come across in my life. I remember I was using it well over 7 years ago, and was in awe of how much power it gave me for free, and how capable of a tool it was. Couldn't donate then, but definitely can now. While I know my time/PRs might be more valuable, regular money will have to do.

schlowmo 10y ago
Word! I just like to add that it's especially indispensable for many community radios across the world. Maybe there are more powerful tools out there (FOSS or not), but I never saw an audio tool with such capabilities which people got used to so quickly like they do with Audacity. The absolutely perfect fit for those community radios where almost everything has to be self-taught.
PepeGomez 10y ago
Has the conversion to 16bit been fixed? Dithering still wasn't working properly the last time I checked.

don_loemax 10y ago

As a club DJ who selects and plays in a digital format now, I like to leave clicks and pops in when digitizing my "white-labels" or vinyl-exclusive releases (some of the best or most coveted tunes are released on vinyl first in very small runs, months before they are available as downloads). I like to normalize then run the recording through Izotope's Ozone 7 on the "warm and transparent" preset to get it closer in loudness to digital releases I am mixing them with. There is a small community of us who share rips of this type of release from around the world, online, as the best place to pick a lot of this kind of record up is in smaller local genre-specific shops. Black Market soho in London was a Mecca of mine or Rooted Records in Bristol but I live in Cali now and have a hard time keeping up my share ratio but still get a rush when I get a great vinyl rip of a tune earlier than most. It is silly and matters very little to my livelihood but an old tradition in dj'ing that I am glad still survives (having tracks the next Dj doesn't, that is).

ams6110 10y ago
Why is this done? Tradition? Certainly it's an extra expense that releasing in pure digital format would not include -- and it's not like all the music is not mastered digitally now anyway -- nobody is mastering on tape and cutting and splicing....
- rfrank 10y ago
  White labels and dubplates in general hearken back to the sound system culture that originated in Jamaica [1]. Mostly a means of getting the newest songs fastest; record something in the morning, press your dubplate that afternoon, play it out that night. The unofficial nature of the recordings makes it easier to hop around copyright stuff and not clear samples, etc. The song Alicia by Mala jumps to mind [2], I don't think it's ever seen a proper release because of the heavy use of Alicia Keys samples. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_system_%28Jamaican%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_system_%28Jamaican%29 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpV7radKuwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpV7radKuwo
  - ams6110 10y ago

kadavy 10y ago

A less technical, step-by-step way (also using Audacity) http://transfermymusic.com/vinyl-to-cd-or-mp3/ http://transfermymusic.com/vinyl-to-cd-or-mp3/

anexprogrammer 10y ago

When I rip vinyl I want as little processing as possible, so no messing around with high pass and pop removal. If it's new or decent condition vinyl the pops and hiss will be barely audible anyway. Far more important to have a decent MC cartridge, and make sure it goes through a decent phono (RIAA) stage, which generally means an older hifi amp, or not-cheap hifi component. Any phono stage of the last 20 years, or the "rip your old records" turntables generally use lowest quality crap going.

TylerE 10y ago
Eh, there are tons of EXCELLENT and not-very-expensive modern phono stages. Just avoid DJ stuff
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  Why avoid DJ stuff? Isn't a Technics deck going to be better than your run of the mill USB vinyl "recorder"?
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  I guess it depends where you place "not very expensive", £100-200 will get you a good hifi preamp phono stage with MC/MM. You can pay far more if you want silly esoterica. It's not very far removed from the quality that would typically come "free" with a decent mid-market older preamp.
  - TylerE 10y ago
    Not just older amps can have good built-ins. Perviously I was running a standalone phono stage (Can't remember the exact model offhand, but it was $250 or so - solid, well reviewed component.) I upgrade to a Rega Brio amp about 2 years ago which has a built in phono stage that was even better.

Animats 10y ago

Of course, the real way to do this is to optically scan the record and simulate a stylus tracking it. The Library of Congress does this.[1] They've even recovered records broken into pieces, by scanning the pieces and reassembling the 3D model. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/how-a-machine-in-the-basement-of-the-library-of-congress-is-saving-the-history-of-recorded-sound/372723/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/how-a-...

coldtea 10y ago
>the real way to do this What's "real" about it? The overwhelming majority of people doing it who are not Libraries do it with a needle.
gfody 10y ago
There doesn't seem to be any free or commercial software that converts high res scans of vinyl records to high quality digital audio. I remember this post from 2002 http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html where a guy posts his results with this approach, but the quality is bad and he doesn't provide source code.

voltagex_ 10y ago

I'm sad that there's no scene standard for ripping vinyls (apart from a few mentions http://scenenotice.org/details.php?id=2006 http://scenenotice.org/details.php?id=2006). I'd like to think they'd use this guide.

rdl 10y ago

Are there any services which will do this for you, given crates?

Cerium 10y ago

Years ago my dad wanted me to listen to 'the classics'. So he handed me a stack of LPs and asked if I was able to convert them into CDs for him. Of course I had to listen to each one to do a good job. I'm happy to see that the process has improved in Audacity over the years. When I used to do this there was not a good provision for adding labels to become tracks.

basicplus2 10y ago

one needs to sample the original at at least double the final finished frequency, or the finished product will have a metallic tinge to it. eg if 44,100hz rate is what you want to end up with, the sample rate needs to be at least 88,200hz.