how to record LPs to Mp3s?

[Archman]

Howdy,

A friend has a bunch of really cool, and really rare LPs, and he wanted to share them but he wants to convert them to MP3s. How difficult is this? He has a pretty good electronic LP player, and a good system... does he just need some cables going from the LP player to the PC, and some software?

Any good links to read up on this?

thanks

 

[montag451]

I would have thought you just about summed it up.

Do a search in anandtech, as there was someone else asking the same q's who got a lot of good advice - within the last couple of months.

 

[ShadowBlade]

i dont know how, but nero says it can do it

 

[nineball9]

If by "LP player" you are referring to a turntable you will want a phono preamp. You could buy a standalone preamp or plug the turntable into a receiver or integrated amp and record from the tape monitor line-out connections.

LP records were/are recorded with an equalization curve (RIAA curve) to overcome the limitations of the vinyl medium. In addition the signal output of a phono cartridge is lower than other devices in an audio system. A phono preamp boosts the signal and applies the reverse equalization curve to restore the original signal.

 

[jackschmittusa]

The phono pre-amps used to be pretty common but can be hard to come by at a reasonable price now (Radioshack used to sell one for about $20, but not now). I have an old AV receiver hooked up to my wife's rig, and connected to it are a turntable, a tapedeck, and a VCR. She captures and burns from all of them. You can now find such receivers at yardsales and flea markets for $25-50.

 

[helpmeout]

A good turntable will have a built in pre-amp, mine does. I made the mistake of buying a preamp without looking at the turntable, and am out about $25 dollars as a result. So check first. Cables from turntable to audio input on the computer are easy to find. I used "Rip Vinyl", which was $$7.00 at the time, to transfer the music to the hard drive. For processing the music, ie clean u8p the audio, I used Magix Audio Cleaning Lab 2004. That program will export audio in many formats, including WAV and MP3. My CD's are as good as factory produced. Of course, I have always protected my records. The Magix program will also rip the tracks from the record-- I already had Rip Vinyl, and thought it was a little easier to set audio levels.

 

[jackschmittusa]

helpmeout

Sell him your pre-amp if he needs it. Make you both happy.

 

[helpmeout]

I've never used it, so wouldn't want to sell something unproven. I'll give it to him for the postage. No good to me.

Of course, if there is a pre-amp built-in, you can't use the external pre-amp- it will kill the audio. That's what happened to me and caused me to take a close look at the turntable, and FINALLY the manual, LOL. Why do I always think I know what I'm doing?

Here is a good guide that I used when starting:

http://the-predator.tripod.com/dell/sec7-9.html

 

[Jeff7]

For audio editing, I use Goldwave. It's got all kinds of nice things to improve old audio; I download Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, but they were recorded in the late 80's and early 90's, on VCRs of the time, and then recompressed into MPEG-4 + 128kbps MP3. So the audio quality took a serious hit; I'm able to use the Parametric EQ function of Goldwave to make drastic improvements to the audio quality.
They have a demo version too, fully functional, except that it only lets you do a limited number of actions per session.

 

[tj06]

I send the TT signal through my A/V receiver, out the tapeout port to the input of my sound card. I then use Adobe Audition to record, click-fix lite to remove bad pops & clicks and finally Roxio to create a CD-R.

I just received a MSFL LP, Crime of the Century (Supertramp) and I hope to record it this weekend. I'm not too familiar yet with my new system which has a different audio card so I should probably pick something else to work with.

It's a tedious, but fun and rewarding hobby.

 

[corkyg]

I have done many LPs using ECDC 5 - don't know about Nero - at that time it would not do A to D conversion.

A to D

 

[MrColin]

As far as software I highly recomend the freeware audio editor Audacity. It can export as .wav, .ogg, and .mp3 (w/ lame_enc.dll) Its at least $100 cheaper, and less crashy than Adobe Audition IMHO.

 

[kjacobs]

Originally posted by: tj06
...I then use Adobe Audition to record, click-fix lite to remove bad pops & clicks and finally Roxio to create a CD-R.

What did you think of Audition? Easy to use? Good quality result?