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Latest news

14 Sep 2006: A new 3.97 version of the LAME software has been released. You will have to follow the links to download the binaries including lame.exe and lame_enc.dll

13 Nov 2007: Version 1.3.4 of Audacity is a new beta release of this highly recommended product. I have been using this since its release and not come across any real problems. However, it does not come with all the language translations available in the stable release.

Links:

• Audacity
• GrooveMechanic
• LAME

Audio Tools

The Audio section is all about obtaining the most out of your music collection, using tools that are freely available over the net.

The section includes some of my experiences with transferring music from LP's to CD, some of the audio players I have used and there is a small section listing some of the audio formats that you may come across. I have also become quite enthusiastic about internet radio, since it seems to offer a good standard of audio quality combined with stations that specialise in music genres to suit all tastes. I also had a look at internet TV, but decided this is not worth investigating further at the moment. The problem seems to be the same as has happened with ordinary TV; more channels and choice definitely leads to an overall dumbing down, and a lessening of the viewing experience.

Protecting Your Vinyl Investment

Within your family you probably have some old vinyl 12" LP's that are gathering dust and which you may have kept for sentimental reasons, but actually will never play again because your turntable is gone or no longer works. The following provides some ideas of what can be done for a very modest outlay.

The Equipment Required

First you will need a turntable that must be of hi-fi quality since this is singly the most important item in making a good CD recording. Check that the stylus and cartridge are in good working order. If not then the best bet is to buy a complete turntable on ebay for about £30. Don't make the mistake of buying a cheap new turntable because it's just a waste of money, probably made in China with a lightweight platter and hopeless cartridge. I use an old Dual CS505-2 for my recordings and I am still very pleased with the sound and the brilliance which betters my admittedly aged Marantz CD player.
You will also need a stereo amplifier, again if you don't possess one then look at buying second-hand on ebay. Even if your prime aim is to make a CD recording of your vinyl collection, you may be surprised at the quality you can obtain with a very modest set-up over much more expensive CD players and home cinema audio. In fact you may consider that the move to CD is one of convenience as opposed to good quality Hi-fi.
I am also informed that a good quality PC sound card is very important for making quality recordings. I am currently using an Audigy Soundblaster card which is by no means expensive and the overall results seem to be good enough to my ear. However, I am not an expert in this area and have not tried using other sound cards. The only thing I would not advise is making do with the sound on the PC Mother Board.
The final piece of equipment (apart from your PC) is a wire with 2 phono leads to plug into your stereo amplifier and a single plug that goes into your line-in socket on your sound card. These can best be purchased from ebay for about £3 - there is no need to pay £20 plus for IPOD connectors.

Recording from Vinyl

The recording software I have been using is called Audacity version 1.2.4 and can be found on the Sourceforge web site. I am not an expert in this area, so I cannot really compare this with other products. All I can say is that it meets my needs and that the product is actively supported with new releases. It is reasonably easy to use, although the method of recording and naming tracks is not as intutive as it could be. Other problems I have found concern the way ID3 tags are created when exporting to MP3. In summary Audacity provides a good recording facility to either AUP files (Audacity's own format) or to WAV files. Once the music has been recorded the hard tasks begin of splitting the tracks and editing. Audacity also allows exporting to WAV, OGG and MP3 format; see following sections.

Editing

Once you are happy with the way the music is recording then the next step to consider is what editing is required to the raw music file to make an acceptable CD. The first thing to do is split the recording into tracks - just look for where the waveform comes to the end of a track, select the inter track gap and replace with 'silence'. This is important as any pops or background hiss on the vinyl will be particularly apparent when there is no music to hide the noise.
The elimination of pops and crackle is a difficult one and if your vinyl is in a bad state then you may not want to take the effort to even try to remove the imperfections. However, if the recording is marred by a relatively small number of pops (say less than 20 per side) then it is worthwhile examining the wave form for spikes. The pops will normally be quite obvious showing as sudden spikes in a smooth waveform. Then magnify this portion of the waveform until you can actually see the points. Use the drawing tool to reshape the waveform into a smooth waveform. Magically the pop will have disappeared. There are automated tools that will do the job, but so far I have only tried GrooveMechanic and I have been impressed by the way it cleaned up quite a dirty disk. I shall try some other automated tools and update this page.

Splitting Tracks

If you record a CD or LP using Audacity you are confronted with the problem of splitting into tracks. Now there is a feature that makes it easy to do just this. The first thing is to go to Analyse and then use Silence Feature. This will analyse the whole of the recording looking for silence based on parameters that you can amend. If you don't get the parameters quite right then you can get some false positives (or maybe even false negatives) and will then generate a numbered label at each patch of silence found. Armed with the names of the tracks you can then go in and edit each of the labels for the name of the song. Then for the clever bit, you can choose Export Multiple which will automatically create an MP3 (or whatever format you choose) file for each track. Much easier and quicker than doing the whole thing manually!!

Exporting to Format

Once you are satisfied with the cleaning of the music, which if you recall is either performed in Audacity using AUP files or in GrooveMechanic using WAV files, you will be ready to create the final version for recording on CD. In the next section you will see a discussion of some of the available file formats available. However, if you want to playback on a conventional CD player be it in the home, car or on portable, the most likely choice will be MP3. MP3 (and OGG) have quite a nice feature that allows identity tags to be attached to the music, so you can see details such as the title, artist, track number, year recorded etc. when played on your PC music player. Audacity and GrooveMechanic both use a plugin DLL called lame_enc.dll which allows you to export the AUP or WAV format to MP3. Note due to licencing restrictions you have to download this DLL separately to the main product. It is recommended to check for the latest version at the LAME website as this product is continuously being improved.

Ripping Audio CD's

This was something I did along time ago and just recently I wanted selected tracks from several of my audio CD's to make a new compilation for use in the car. I almost forgot how this was achieved until I took another look at Audacity. So this time I used Winamp to play the tracks I wanted and used Audacity to record the tracks. Finally I used Audacity to export each required track to MP3 and then I burnt the CD in the usual way. This method is quite useful because you don't need the professional version of Winamp. I will add some more detail because there are quite a few settings that are required in Audacity and this time I was using the 1.3.5 Beta version which does not have any documentation. I normally output MP3's at 160 kb/s as opposed to the default setting of 128 kb/s - if you want to change the MP3 bitrate then when you export to MP3 just choose options and make the change from the dropdown. This then becomes the default for future recordings.

Burning CD's

One important point to note is that it is much easier to record all the audio tracks on the CD in one session. From reading some of the literature it is possible to record multi-session audio, but I have had no luck with my version of Ahead Nero, and you may have to install drivers etc. and the end result may not be playable on your standard CD player. This is quite an important point because often with some of the old vinyl LP's you can get 2 LP's and more on one 700mb Compact Disc. Using Ahead Nero is fairly straightforward and I don't believe anyone has the sort of problems with wasted CD's when CD recorders first started out. There are many alternatives to Nero, but I believe in the saying that if it's not broke then why fix it. I use the free version that comes with most CD burners. I am just starting to play with Microsoft burner that comes with Media Player; at the moment it is not possible say if this is an advance or not.