Thread: A monster Question with no satisfactory answers as yet

Get yourself a copy of Nero and an Optimus turntable (with built in pre-amp) from Dick Smiths and the world will be your oyster!.

I have been converting my LPs to CD for a couple of years now and the system works beautifully with above components. You can take out all the clicks and crackles, disc surface noise etc and the end result is fabulous.

That's probably the quickest & easiest method, and also uses the least hard-drive space... but I reckon it's a compromise.

I prefer to sit down and record the whole LP direct to hard-drive as one humongous WAV file, then load it into Sound Studio Pro or Cubase and break the recording up into individual tracks. (I was often tempted to move to Cakewalk instead, but $$$...)

I can then apply the filters/effects to suit each track, rather than as an 'average" over the whole volume. I often have problems with wow and flutter, which meant later tracks need different tweaks to the earlier ones. (Oh, the joys of cheap turntables. )

It takes a lot of time... which is why I'd rather buy a CD instead. IF one is available.

I am wanting to convert my LP's to Cd's and MP3's as well.
My research has indicated.
Turntable with phono outputs, plugs into pre-amp to provide amplification suitable for sound card in PC (but also equalisation for phono output, I think).
Pre amplifier output plugs into "Line In" on sound card.
That is all the physical hardware stuff done.

From a software point of view there are freebies around (audacity is one) but they tend to be more complicated to use. If you want a simple approach try LP Ripper and LP Recorder from http://www.cfbsoftware.com/default.aspx. It is an Australian programme and costs around $110 for both programmes. You can download a trial version before you buy.

The LP Recorder program will just take the ouput from your turntable and create a wave file suitable for putting onto a CD. If you have 6 tracks on side one of the LP and you want to record all of them, you have 3 options.

1. Use LP Recorder and at the end of every track, stop the recording and start a new one. This will create the 6 tracks as 6 wave files but you will have to be listening and operating the software for the duration.

2. Use LP Recorder and record all of the 6 tracks as one wave file. You don't need to be there for every track start and finish. Now you can use the Edit facility of LP Recorder and you find the start and stop of individual tracks and you break them up into 6 wave files.

3. Use LP Recorder and record all of the 6 tracks as one wave file. You don't need to be there for every track start and finish. Now you use the LP Ripper program and it automatically looks for gaps between tracks and breaks up the 1 wave file into the 6 wave files.

With all of the options above your wave files will be called Track 1 to Track 6.
If you want to name the tracks with the correct titles, you can edit the names yourself or other wise go to a website such as freedb.org or gracenote.com and type in the name of your LP and it should find it and provide you with all of the track names. You can copy and paste these into the LP programme and then create a CD using you CD burning program.

If you want to create MP's, you can get a plug in for LP Recorder/Ripper that can generate MP3's.

Note: The LP Ripper program should handle the breakup of most LP's OK. It may have trouble with recordings from Live events or Classical music in determining the correct start stop of the track. In live events there may not be silence between tracks because of audience clapping etc. For classical music, there maybe be silent periods within the track that are not the start and stop of the track.

Ripper, your detail sounds similar to what Nero will do, although splitting into tracks seems like it may be simpler with Nero as you have complete manual control if you want it. The editing features with Nero are superb and simple too. Also, as Nero is a suite of bits and pieces, you can also do lots of other beaut things, including dealing with photos and movies- making slide shows etc.

Good luck.

Flipflop

Sorry, that last post should have been addressed to Jigsaw (where the hell did I get Ripper from).

Flipflop