Wootage
 

In honor of the outdated slang thread I am adding the "age" suffix to all my threads. Not "age" as in how old, but "age" as in cabbage.

Anyway,
My buddy just got a USB turntable from his GF for xmas. He brought it over to my house and I am going to start recording my old vinyl out of print stuff. A lot of my dad's old folk and blues records. I don't remember what else there is. Gonna take a few weeks I expect.

I'll keep you posted.

WOOTage

WOOTage sounds like something Pauly Shore would say.

If this is not about woot.com, I am confused.

w00t!

FOOTage ..not like film but like cabbage?

Cabbage is the clue huh? ( the ole frontal lobe?)

the woot is escaping me though but then it always has.

It sounds like a great plan though. The part I understand.

We're doing that at Chateau Limey, too. Watch out for the sound levels - on that ole vinyl they actually had loud and quiet and stuff, not all levelled out like nowadays :yelsick:!

Does it use a needle or light to read the record?

I've done it, too. The sound quality is not as I remember.

I highly recommend Wave Corrector. It will fix a lot of problems on its own. And it makes it easy to find and fix the areas that don't get fixed automatically. Also helps split the tracks so you can just record the whole side at once.

hmm will note that!
I don't know, I'm just a squirell. But I'll ask.
Thanks, Pete. I'll check it out.

I may have a chance to start tonight, if I can stay away from this place long enough.

@ sky- are you smoking those left handed cigarettes again? :p

From a quick peek Audacity looks similar to the pro version of Wave Creator and is free.
I've recorded from our existing vinyl deck to my laptop using it. (RCA plugs out to line in)
The thing I need to find is a proper record cleaning brush to get them in good shape before recording, garbage in -> garbage out. and to dig out the rest of my records from the basement.

I've used both. IMO, when you've got a bunch of albums to do, WC will help you get it done easier and quicker. It's dedicated to the vinyl->digital task.

WC has a trial version. Try them both and see what works best for you.

And then do it really really fast so you can get it all done within the trial time period.

With Audacity, once I got going and into a rhythm, it would take me about 2 hours to get one of my vinyl albums recorded, broken into tracks, cleaned up, and burned to CD. But only about 45 minutes of that time required direct attention from me.

The trial version is hobbled, you can only do 2 minutes, only one stereo track etc.

OK,
I have started firing up the little jammie and I'm transferring King Of America right now. I did a test with their point and click numbskull software and I didn't like it, so I am using audacity.

Pretty frigging cool. It's not an audiophile's wetdream by far, but now I can move all my out of print vinyl to 111100000000101s.

On deck is Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's Good Evening, The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch (missing from my boxed Eno set), Some Richie Havens, A ton of old Folkways recordings, Leadbelly's last sessions, and one for Zippyt: "Rejoice Dear Hearts" Brother Dave Gardner.

I have a Whole Collection if you Want
Copys Squirley feetz

I will take the Pete and Dud, and in trade I offer all my Derek and Clive.

Cool. Do you want me to ship a disk or put it up on cmep or my ftp site?

It's pretty clean as far as vinyl noise.

Up on deck:
Leadbelly's last sessions
38 favorite american folk songs: Pete seeger, leadbelly, woody guthrie
Newport blues festival 1963
Newport Folk Festival 1963
Original London cast of Rocky Horror Show (no picture)

cmep it

Aw crap now I have to get my vinyl ripping shit together. I confess to only having a best-of collection of Derek and Clive at the ready. I made the selections myself. I have cmep'd them, in two parts. Not Safe for Work, Children, Wives or Anybody Else For That Matter.

OK will cmep tomorrow.

OK How OCD should I be about my audio quality? I was using audacity and I've ripped about six or seven albums. I was working on a particularly subtle Jean Redpath track from Song of The Seals, "Davvy Faa" and to get rid of the little bit of crackle using audacity it would seriously distort the sound of the harp even at very low levels of fixing.

Then I realized that I have Adobe's Sound Booth which has a much better noise removal tool and I tried it and it was really amazing at taking out only the crackle and not any of the subtleties of the harp or her voice.

Now I am trying really hard not to go and delete everything I've ripped so far and re-record them with Sound booth.

Another option, but I'm not sure if it gains me anything is to export as a 16 bit WAV file and clean it up in Sound booth.

decisions...

Some stuff is in worse shape and needs the extra help, some doesn't. If you've got lots of vinyl, this can be a long job. How good it needs to be depends on how much the noise bothers you.

You also need to consider what your time is worth, and if it's available on CD or iTunes. Oh, and how often you will listen to it after you convert it.

If you are having fun doing this, then none of that really matters, because you can consider the journey to be the main thing and the end result to just be the icing on the cake.

All good points, especially to a rational mind. I am only ripping stuff that is out of print or really hard to find. Everything that is available on cd I'm not bothering with.

I think pitting "How much will I listen to this?" against "How noisy is this?" is a good equation for making that decision.

I may go back and re-do a couple of them, but the rest, not so much.

I am enjoying the journey and it is enriching to learn about editing audio and audio files this way.

You probably ripped the ones you wanted the most, first.;)

I was gonna post that... It's true.