LP to Digital
I have around 150 LP records from the good old days of vinyl; some of it is music I’ve owned since high school. I was given a USB turntable for Christmas and I finally unpacked my LPs from their boxes for the first time in years and set about digitizing them. At one time my collection was two or three times that size, but I’ve sold off so much of it back when it was clear that LP was a dead format. It’s funny looking back at what I have and what I sold along the way. Some stuff I sold and now I’m buying back in digital form, other things I kept and I’m scratching my head wondering why I’ve been dragging that around for all these years.
One thing this brings back is memories of the CD vs LP arguments in the late 80’s. At the time I had a roommate who was a real audiophile, who spent serious money on his turntable, and he challenged me to a double blind test. In every case, I picked LP over CD, but in the end it didn’t matter. CDs are a lot smaller, more portable, and more versatile, and by 1990 I had all but given up on the LP format. It’s funny timing that the NY Times covered both the decline in audio quality and changes in listening habits. I don’t actively listen the way I used to. Part of it is that I’m not really a musician anymore and I don’t tend to pick apart what I’m listening to, but part of it is that I definitely have switched from music as an activity to music as an accessory.
Anyway, I’ve started the process of converting some of those old LPs to digital.
How to digitize records with Ubuntu, a USB Turntable and Audacity.
A couple of things that weren’t clear about working with Audacity:
- As mentioned in the article, I can’t seem to get the play-through option to work, which means that I can’t listen as I record. This is a problem because you don’t find out about skips until you’ve already recorded.
- When you click on the label track to set the start of a label, that automatically sets the play cursor to the same point. This is very useful when trying to trim dead space from the start of a track.
- When labeling tracks, it’s much better to sketch the outlines of the track start and stop, set the labels, and then refine the start and stop to get them set correctly. It’s way easier to move the label markers than to move the highlights around.
- At this point, I’m running my projects at 44100 Hz, but I may play around with that setting after I’ve spent some time listening to the results.
— Gordon Weakliem
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