Ideas On Digitizing Vinyl 33 1/3 records

[tony j. podrasky]

I'm looking for some ideas on how to go about digitizing my old 33 1/3 record albums.

Two thing:

o I'm not Mr. High-Tech: I still like using a
Dumb Terminal as the front end of the Linux
box. Yes, I do have a graphics head that I
can use in a pinch :-)

o I don't have any WinDOZE platforms. I'd like to keep it that way, but if I have to build a WinDOZE box to do this, well, I have about 300 albums I would like to digitize and then toss, so what has to be has to be.

What utility would you recommend to take the stereo audio stream coming from the turntable and writing it to a file?

With the price of 1/2 TB disk drives going for $120.oo @ Frys, it is actually practical to put all the files on a couple of those instead of burning 300 CDROMs.

Any (useful) replies will get a "10".

regards,
tonyp

[Court Campbell · Accepted solution]

Enjoy!

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6628

P.S. Don't toss the vinyl, sell it on eBay.

[Court Campbell]

I should also mention that this is an older article. You shouldn't worry about the info about the kernel.

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

I've no idea if you can get it to work with Linux, but these look pretty cool !

http://www.iwantoneofthose.com/usb-turntable/index.html

I'm sure there are probably similar alternatives out there...

Cheers,

Rob

[Craig Gilmore]

Instead of the UK link, try this:

http://www.ion-audio.com/ittusb.php

The turntable is available from a variety of different sources. Retails for about $150. US.

WinDOZE or Apple support... No support for Linux yet.

Using Windows with Media Player/recorder, this process is straightforward.

Failing that solution, you can attach the Headphone jack of an Amp to the Microphone input on the PC. Then, use one of the various recording software packages that will run on Linux. (Lower quality recording in my opinion.)

No, your terminal attachment will not work. Also, getting the MIC input to work really depends on the quality level of the sound card in the PC and the availabilty of a driver for the card in Linux.

I punted, used the USB turntable and Windows. I'm pleased with the result. Just kicking myself for all the cassettes that I tossed some years back.

[Rick Beldin]

I found this $7 piece of shareware to be excellent:

http://www.ripvinyl.com/

Windows based however, so you might have to get over that hurdle.

The nice thing about this is that it will detect the silence (fairly well) between songs and break up your records into songs and convert them to mp3 (I think other formats supported now as well).

I also use GoldWave on Windows to clean out the pops and crackles. I am sure that there a newer OpenSource projects to handle these tasks, but I started this some time ago.

[Van den Broeck Tijl]

There is an excellent article on that here: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Ripping_Vinyl_with_GNU_Linux
(be sure to read the comments at the article as well, some interesting suggestions on wave cleaning tools)

Imho, the best approach as well, I don't like the general quality you get out of these popular USB-thingies. Using decent material (player,needle,connections,preamp -if needed at all-) with an A-grade soundcard the resulting quality will be much better.

If you've got a vinyl player with a line exit (such as SynQ XTRM-1, Reloop RP-6000, Stanton ST-150, Numark TT-X1, ...) it makes the job of equalizing a lot easier.

[tony j. podrasky]

Hey Guys;

Thanx for all the ideas. I wound up going with the ripvinyl utility. I picked up an old laptop that had windows98 on it. I loaded the demo version of ripvinyl and it works well. I was able to connect my old turntable directly to the mic input. No problem!

Thanx again.

regards,
tonyp

[tony j. podrasky]

See the above note.