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Saturday August 06, 2005

Converting Vinyl Records to Audio CD's

I had this "great" idea about 8-10 years ago. There was a list of classic "old" (1960-1980) albums that I'd never heard that I wanted to buy. So many of them that it would have cost more than I wanted to spend if I tried to get them as CDROM's (assuming I could even find them).

I decided to see if I could find them as LP's and listen to them that way. Bookbuyers, one of my favorite local second hand book sellers, has a large record section as well, so I bought about ten of the ones on my list there, for a reasonable price.

The problem with my great idea, which is really a problem with this dated technology, is that you have to get up every twenty minutes or so, and turn over or change the LP to continue listening to the music. I found that I just didn't have the enthusiasm to do that anymore. I didn't think about converting to CDROM at the time, so the album list was shelfed.

Recently I've noticed that the Palo Alto library book sale are selling LP's in their bargain room for a dollar each. I starting thinking about finishing my list, but this time converting them all to CDROM's, and also copying my favorites onto the hard drive on my compter(s), to use with iTunes.

Earlier this week, I started researching how to do this. No doubt there are countless ways, but this is what I ended up doing. I wanted to do this conversion as cheaply as possible. I already had a Technics Quartz Direct Drive Turntable system (SL-1200MK2), which is decent record deck. Nothing to give an audiophile an instant orgasm, but good enough for me. I hooked this up to an old Pioneer VSX-D702S Audio Video Stereo Receiver I had.

I needed a cable that would go between the line in on my PC and the two line outs from the front amp on the back of the receiver. I found one that almost worked, and with the help of a couple gender benders that a friend of mine at work found, I was all set.

I started from the Digital Sound and Music website of Tom and Mary O'Haver. In particular, their Word document entitled "Converting records to audio CDs". I used Cool Edit 96 from method 1 to create .WAV files for each of the tracks on the record. I then used the latest Windows Media Player (WMP) to burn a CDROM. Finally I used iTunes to print a jewel case label for that album for me. I selected one of my oldest albums for this inital trial conversion.

Here's a few more details.

Recording the tracks: after downloading and installing Cool Edit 96, I followed steps 1-10 of Method 1. I was using an ICE-Cube which has Realtek AC 97 Audio. I used 44100, stereo, 16 bits and saved into Windows PCM (.wav) format. The length of the album was about 31 minutes and this generated about 225 MB's of data. Each side took about 3-4 minutes to perform the noise reduction transformation.
Burning the CDROM: this was pretty much straight forward after I'd point WMP at the directory where I had the newly created tracks and then clicked on each track entry in WMP and added in the Artist and Album name. I was then able to Click on Burn, then Click on Edit Playlist, select Artist\Album and select my one and only album. Clicking on each of the tracks copies it over to the burn list column where you can easily reorder them with the arrow keys. Put a blank CD-R disk in the drive and click on Start Burn and you're away. It took about 9-10 minutes to burn the CDROM.
Creating a Jewel Case Label: according to instructions from Tom and Mary, I should have been able to create a label for this album in WMP, but I couldn't see the option. I ended up starting up iTunes, which then went out and found the album info for my newly created CD (which impressed the hell out of me), and I could then select File->Print. I printed a single-sided black and white copy to use with the slim jewel case.

The whole conversion took about 2 hours, but that included learning how to use the tools. The next one should be faster.

My wife and I have just over 100 albums. Some of them are doubles with one triple - a boxed set of Zappa. Now that I know that the conversion works, I've but an order into Jameco for 100 blank CD-R's and 100 slim colored jewel cases. That should keep me going for a few months.

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