Ripping Vinyl

TheMorningStar

So, I scored big time at a yard sell yesterday. I got 150 records, in good condition, and a really nice record player will almost a brand new needle. All for 80 bucks.

Right now I have it feeding into the line in on my sound card, running through an equalizer, and back out the sound card to my speakers. I have looked online for programs to rip the vinyl the my pc, but they all cost money. There has to be a free program that will allow me to record data coming in through the line in jack, and another program to split the tracks up. Does anybody know where I can get such a program, or does anybody have any advice on the best way to get the vinyl on my comp? Any experiences?


TIA.

japan

Audacity.

It sounds like you've got it all set up fine, just use that to record the .. erm .. records, split them up, and then use these instructions to install the lame mp3 encoder to allow Audacity to export to mp3.

TheMorningStar

Thanks man! I'll have to try this when I get home.

Pheezer

Audacity is pretty much the best free option you've got and it's a good deal better than many non-free options.

tardcore

Damnit, there was this USB Vinyl ripper out there that my friend had. I'll see if I can track down a link.

EggyToast

note that anything that claims to split vinyl will simply look for gaps in between songs and split them up that way, so anything that has continuous tracks or pauses in the music will cause it to flip out. I haven't played with audacity enough to know if it supports regions or slices, but that would be the fastest way -- simply put a region marker or slice marker where you want the tracks to cut, and export the regions/slices to a folder.

There's always going to be some manual aspect to it, as vinyl is often recorded at a lower volume compared to a ripped cd. Since you have to record it at 1x speed, there's really no "fast" way to do it. But yes, Audacity will definitely let you record and copy/paste and trim and do other things to generally edit music recorded off of vinyl.

skimbleshanks

http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/mp3/90a0/

tony_important

tardcore wrote: »

Damnit, there was this USB Vinyl ripper out there that my friend had. I'll see if I can track down a link.

I have it, but I'm having serious trouble controlling the rip volume. Nothing I've tried works.

But it's most likely my problem, as another friend has one and it works like a charm.

AtomBomb

Record players put out a much lower signal than something like a CD player. Generally they require a pre-amp, or they need to be plugged into a standard amplifier that has a record input (if you want to get the line-in volume to normal levels).

When I did this a long ass time ago (Windows 95 I think), I ran the record player into my stereo amp, RCA out on my amp into a 1/8" stereo plug adapter, into my soundcard, and recorded it with the (included with Windows) wave recorder. I was going to manually split the tracks, but on a Pentium 100 it was just too painful, so I ended up just having seperate files for each side of the record. The quality did come out nice, and I didn't have to worry about damaging some hard to find records whenever I wanted to listen to them.