Vinyl to mp3 conversion?

[tmac]

Hello. I'm wondering about the best, cleanest way to transfer my vinyl to mp3 files. My wife got me a brookstone direct drive usb turntable, but I suspect there's a better sounding method. Thoughts, experiences...?

[grawk]

The best way is hard to pin down, but a friend of mine does an amazing job with a galiber turntable, doshi phono-preamp, and whichever high end dac he's using that day. But he goes to aiff or flac, not to mp3.

[jp11801]

There are many variables in vinyl transfer and to move up from what you have may involve anywhere from $500 to $5000 depending on what table, cart, phono pre and software you use.

I would not transfer to mp3, I have used audacity ( a free program) that is great particularly for the price. I now use wave editor and peak LE but the combo is $175 ish.
If you can transfer them to FLAC or ALAC or better yet WAV or AIFF that is more ideal.

As far as a step up table wise, a good direct drive table from the 80s like the sony psx6 or 7 or psx 500-800 tables are great as are the technics 1200. This plus an entry level phono pre (think $200 ish here) will set upi back $300-500 table dependent. If you need a cart my strong recommendation in the under $100 segment is the black pearl from sumiko.

I used a set up slightly upgrade from that and did wonderful transfers. I have taken a massive step up and so have my transfers but at the level I described you can do wonderful transfers.

[Blind Tree Frog]

Why would you recommend that he convert them to an uncompressed digital format rather than a lossless compressed format? I'm not following the logic there.

[tmac]

I've got a turntable for listening. A Thorens td 166 MKii, with a Shure M97 XE cartridge, running through an old Fisher 400 reciever hooked-up to some mid size JBLs. Now, keep in mind I'm pretty new to all this. Can wave, or flac be played on an ipod? Do I need to hook a DAC (I'm assuming that stands for digital / analog converter) into my system, and if so, where?

[memepool]

Originally Posted by Blind Tree Frog

Why would you recommend that he convert them to an uncompressed digital format rather than a lossless compressed format? I'm not following the logic there.

It's always better to capture at the highest possible resolution as it's better for editing and will result in better quality transcriptions in the end whether you leave them as uncompressed or compress to a lossless or lossy codec.

Moreover ripping vinyl is a lot of work and it's simply not worth the effort if you are mastering to a 2nd rate compressed format as chances are you'll then want to do it again when you get a better soundcard, player or whatever.

[memepool]

Originally Posted by tmac

Can wave, or flac be played on an ipod? Do I need to hook a DAC (I'm assuming that stands for digital / analog converter) into my system, and if so, where?

Assuming you have a computer then you can plug the Reciever tape loop into the line in/outs of your soundcard. It's tape out to line in and line out to tape in.
Then when you press tape monitor on the reciever you can hear the record as it goes into the computer, and when you finished select tape to hear the computer soundcard play out through the reciever.

Once you've finished editing the recording of the vinyl, usually by topping and tailing and declicking, and loading and tagging all the individual tracks in itunes, you can transfer and play it as uncompressed WAV or AIFF on an ipod but they take up more space so generally it's better to compress to lossless for this purpose.

If you use FLAC or ALAC you can discard the original WAV or AIFF as these are identical and can always be unpacked again if you want to edit more at a later stage. If you want to make MP3 or AAC for size reasons then it's better to keep the uncompressed versions for backup.

[Blind Tree Frog]

Originally Posted by memepool

It's always better to capture at the highest possible resolution as it's better for editing and will result in better quality transcriptions in the end whether you leave them as uncompressed or compress to a lossless or lossy codec.

Moreover ripping vinyl is a lot of work and it's simply not worth the effort if you are mastering to a 2nd rate compressed format as chances are you'll then want to do it again when you get a better soundcard, player or whatever.

I'm getting the feeling that you don't know what the word "lossless" means.

[nukular]

I have a harman kardon cd player/recorder hooked into my system. I simply burn my albums to cdrw (I do have to put in manual track increments using the remote...so damn I have to LISTEN to the music! *8^) ) Then I just rip them to my iTunes collection as apple lossless. They sound stellar.

I also wet clean my albums using a nitty gritty cleaner and record doctor fluid so pops and clicks are not as common for me (turntable/arm/needle also make a difference), but I also don't worry about them much. If there are too many of them then the vinyl isn't in that good of shape and I'll look to rid myself of the album or get a cleaner copy.

[1UP]

Well writing speed may be an issue for older systems; ditto read-writes whilst editing - I dunno if it's analogous to video but I always used to prefer editing raw bigass avis vs DV

[memepool]

Originally Posted by Blind Tree Frog

I'm getting the feeling that you don't know what the word "lossless" means.

Sorry what's your point?

[Blind Tree Frog]

Originally Posted by memepool

Sorry what's your point?

Lossless encoding loses no information, so a rip to WAV followed by a FLAC encoding leaves you with a compressed file that decodes to the exact same signal as the uncompressed WAV file.

So you are not losing any quality and gaining a smaller file size. I don't see the gain not to do it. If one were recommending against using a Lossy compression, yeah, I can understand that, but not lossless.

[grawk]

The original post was about ripping to mp3, so the concerns were valid.

[Blind Tree Frog]

Originally Posted by grawk

The original post was about ripping to mp3, so the concerns were valid.

The second reply was the one I was questioning however

Originally Posted by jp11801

If you can transfer them to FLAC or ALAC or better yet WAV or AIFF that is more ideal.

As he was recommending WAV being more ideal that FLAC. Thus my questioning of the statement.

[memepool]

Originally Posted by Blind Tree Frog

Lossless encoding loses no information, so a rip to WAV followed by a FLAC encoding leaves you with a compressed file that decodes to the exact same signal as the uncompressed WAV file.

So you are not losing any quality and gaining a smaller file size. I don't see the gain not to do it. If one were recommending against using a Lossy compression, yeah, I can understand that, but not lossless.

You misunderstand. What we are talking about is transcribing an analogue medium to digital, which is not the same as ripping

Although there are hardware recorders available which will encode to MP3 on the fly, these are mostly intended for voice dictation. Other than proprietry codecs like ATRAC, pretty much every recording device on the market uses uncompressed PCM (ie something equivalent to .wav or. aiff).

In fact I'm pretty sure most computer soundcards will not record real time in a compressed format either, lossy or lossless, because there is little point. The cache files on the harddrive will be uncompressed PCM and when you save then either a header for .wav will be written or else the cache will be re-encoded to whatever codec you have chosen.

Lossless encoding is akin to compressing files in a .zip format whereas lossy codecs prioritise what information is stored and how in order to save space, without sacrificing too much of the original, like a Jpeg picture. Neither of these formats are much use for editing and that's what most people will want to do when transcribing their records.