Time Consuming Steps - Digitizing Vinyl ?

Hi All! I have never done any analog to digital conversions of any type, so I'm a total rookie.

I spend a few months a year at a vacation home. When I'm there, I actually welcome any kind of 'busy' work. Ripping vinyl seems to fit the bill, but I don't want to transport my good turntable and 4 big boxes of albums for 3 days each way.

I could rip raw files to Audicity while at my main home, then take the hard drive to the vacation home, and do any clean up and file manipulation there. But what is the actual percentage of time of the raw ripping process and file manipulation for the total process? 80/20? 50/50?

Thanks

 

Depends on how much post processing you want to do and, if it's a lot, how much you want to spend on software that can do it for you.

I record at 44.1/16 to Audacity, then manually copy and paste each song into a seperate track, then save it off as FLAC. The most time consuming part is doing the id3 work, which I also do manually using mp3tag. I don't do any hiss or pop removal, or normalization or anything. Total time of post-processing per record side is around 10 minutes.

I know guys who manually remove pops using izotope, along with companding where necessary and re-eq'ing if the recording is too bright or otherwise flat. They do all this at 96KHz/24-bit then dither to CD quality when they are done. They scan in the artwork and make custom CD slipcases, etc... It probably takes them an entire day for a single record. It's their hobby, so, you know, whatever floats your boat

 

I used to use Audio Cleaning Lab to do this. You can remove pops/clicks, add metadata and save as a .wav file.

 

7's and 12's (singles) are much easier
For me for a full length album, depends on how much I have to clean up and how anal i'm going to be about it.
Recording, splitting, converting, tagging, repair I can go between an hour and a half to two per LP.
Album cover, I just save a discogs pic of the title I have and rename it 'folder'
Tagging, MP3tag and use the discogs release number to match my manufacture.

 

Declicking is where you'll spend your time. You will need to find software that you are happy with.

Recording is real time. Splitting up the files takes a couple of minutes after you've done a few. Before you get to that stage, you'll want to declick or fix other issues. This is a royal pain to do manually, so you'll want to automate it. But this takes time to dial in the setting. Once you get this done it becomes easier. After you get a process down, it's like 40 minutes for the record (again real time) then 5-10 minutes post processing. But you can take longer as you have the entire length of the next record to get this done.

 

Why waste your time ripping vinyl to 16/44.1? Just go get the CD and rip it lossless.

 

In my experience, it's about 20/80. 45 minutes recording per LP; twice that to run through "cleaner" software; about the same to play cleaned files, manually remove any remaining imperfections, and cut and tag the results.

 

Because something like this can't be found on cd

 

Still...why not rip to 24 bit?

 

It was a half joke. Do any of today's ADC even do 16 bit? Maybe he doesn't want to deal with dithering and his playback only deals with 16
Even though that transfer above I did was probably recorded in 44 I always default it to 96 for sample rate. Overkill, but I enjoy looking for the cut-offs

 

Because I'm not doing any post-processing that would warrant dithering back down to 16 bit, and 16 bits of dynamic range is more than enough for recording an LP, especially the old LPs I'm digitizing.

 

probably find a few tips in this thread.

Your Vinyl Transfer Workflow (sharing best needledrop practices)*

 

It's been a very long time since I was a practicing Catholic, but isn't dithering a sin?

 

If you do a wash and a wood glue cleaning, there's not that much left to edit, but doing all that is literally like watching glue dry. When recording at 96kHz, the otherwise empty spectrum above 25kHz, with a small FFT size for high temporal resolution, will display remaining clicks, and you can decide how much you need to heal them.

 

Also, pretty much all of the "USB turntables" are limited to 16-bit. The Sony DSD table is the only one I know otherwise.

 

Only at Confession

 

That sounds like a lot of work, particularly when there are some 4000 LP's ...

 

I'm far from being a total vinyl fan boy, but it may be difficult to match the dynamics and masterings of some of my classic rock vinyl.

 

But would vinyl sound really benefit from 24-bit?

 

I bought the Parasound Zphono a few years ago but have yet to connect it to my rig. IIRC, it should work with Audacity ...

 

How automated or manual is the pops/clicks removal software? Declicking one pop at a time is a major pain in the you-know-what? I am not even sure how that waveform (with pops/clicks) looks like on Audacity. While I have digitized two open-reel tapes, they had no pop and clicks ...

 

Is declicking etc. automatically as good as doing it manually? Is it not detrimental to the sound?

When I did this some years ago I used a manual declick software, 'Wave Repair', which worked very well. A typical track would take two hours to do, so a whole album would be twenty hours or so. Of course you couldn't do it for long without going round the bend! The results though were excellent although there was often one annoying blemish that was almost impossible to remove.

Wave Repair

Please check the introduction to see its compatability.

 

One declick per pop, this is just back-breaking labor intensive ...

 

Unless you're willing to listen to the recorded LP "raw" (i.e. no repairs; like we did in the cassette days), then it can get very tedious. It's almost certainly worth it to run the initial recordings through an automated "cleaner". Audacity is not good for this and there are no free solutions that get much credit. "ClickRepair" is not expensive and is said to remove most unwanted sound without badly harming the original recording. I've found that even with the use of an automated cleaner, you still need to listen to the recording one more time and manually remove anything that got through. After that, Audacity is great for marking track boundaries, adding tags, and exporting into individual tracks. Save your work file as an Audacity "Project" and you can come back to it later if you need to make any further edits.

As with much of this "hobby", there is controversy about this. I record in 16-bit with excellent results. There isn't an LP (or cartridge) ever made that comes close to the 96 dB of dynamic range captured by 16 bits. Most albums are closer to 50 dB; none exceed 70 dB even with dbx/CX noise reduction.

Neat device; hadn't seen that one before. No reason it would not work with Audacity. Main rig tape out to Zphono line in, then Zphono USB to computer. In Audacity, be sure the software record volume control is at 100%. Use the volume control on front of Parasound unit to set peaks to -10 dB. Good luck!

 

Long time since I recorded my vinyl, seem to remember I just checked the time for each side and then a timer & sat back.

Since I've done manual click repair using Wavepad Sound, absolute pain, over the last 3 years iZotope RX2's automated function. RX is far better and again just leave it to run, depending on how bad the track is it takes around 2-3 minutes per track.

I use Wavepad to split tracks and cut off any lead in then insert a 1 second silent lead in. Then it's reverse the tack using dBpower amp and then iZotope them.

I've also done projects for friends, the most recent needledrops from African vinyl, which is the worst I've ever heard.

The results and people can't believe the source and end result. Time wise it depends if you count sitting down reading a book whilst it's all happening but circa 45 minutes to record and around 30 minutes to declick, then tag using dBpoweramp, which takes about 30 seconds.

So in total around 2-3 hours per album and many books read.