Converting Vinyl to MP3

markst33

Hi there,

I got aan ION Powerplay usb powered Vinyl archiving turntable for xmas and it came with EZ Vinyl/Tape convertor by Mixmeister. I have rigged it up and converted 2 LP's out of about 300 which I own.

I have a couple of questions which I hope someone can help me with

1. Is this good software before I spend the rest of the year coverting Albums or is there better out there on the Interweb somewhere ?

2. Is there anyway of bypassing iTunes

3. I noticed that when I recorded an album it did not recognise the gaps between songs on Side A twice and Side B once so as a result I have 8 songs instead of 10 although I know that 2 songs are now contained in 1 file. Is there a way of correcting this ?

Any other suggestions, tips etc would be most gratefully received.

Mark.

edzillion

1. I use Polderbits (because it has a crackle/pop filter that sometimes comes in handy) but I think that it really won't make a huge difference what software you use. If it is sound quality your after your weak link is going to be the DA/AD converter on your USB turntable.

2. Try MediaMonkey - it does everything that iTunes does except synch easily with ipods, ipads etc. If you have a non-apple mp3 player you will find it much better.

3. This will happen quite a lot, it depends on how the vinyl has been pressed (how long a gap there is between tracks, how silent this gap is). I do all my track cutting manually (with Audacity) which is time-consuming but means you will always get all the tracks.

good luck

ed

cnocbui

I replied to your other thread also.

I would question whether the cartridge on the turntable is any good or whether you were encoding the MP3s at a low bit rate before worrying about the D/A converter. What bit rate were you encoding at? I would suggest 192 kbps or higher.

I mentioned Audacity in the other thread. You can use it to split a long track into sections and save them as separate files but it is a manual process and won't happen automatically.

dowtchaboy

I started to convert my LP collection but it is tedious! It is also very humbling to realise how much hiss, crackle, wow and flutter existed on what I thought were perfect records and turntables.

I finally realised it was easier and morally justifiable to torrent most of what I already own on vinyl. Good quality, tracks split correctly, no long gaps between tracks, track titles and information often easily available etc.
The hunt for downloadable copies also led to interesting sidebars like artist output I had not known about, live and concert versions, similar artists - expanded my horizons a bit.
Of course there are obscure LPs and some reel to reel tracks in my collection I'll have to convert - someday!

edzillion

Totally agree with your stance on downloading rips of records you already have. I would recommend demonoid but they're down at the minute (they've gone and come back in the past).

It's when you get to the rare records that you can't find a rip of online... keep digging in the crates right?

dowtchaboy

edzillion wrote: »

Totally agree with your stance on downloading rips of records you already have. I would recommend demonoid but they're down at the minute (they've gone and come back in the past).

It's when you get to the rare records that you can't find a rip of online... keep digging in the crates right?

Yeah - I have a real Heath-Robinson setup - belt-drive turntable (never could afford direct drive), elliptical stylus (or is it bi-radial?), Sony amp with a nice low noise preamp, lots of heavy copper grounding everything trying to avoid hum, tinfoil shielding other cables, .... and then you spend an hour or more transferring an LP, listen back to it trying to work out if you have left enough headroom or is the signal too low for good s/n ratio.... it's just too painful! Someday - when I have a quiet stable warm secure place to set this stuff up - I'll get the odddball ones I got at flea markets, or 'bootleg' ones sold outside the stadium (Jethro Tull in SF, 1971!) done then - maybe.

Demonoid is fine for me at the moment - you do know they have migrated to demonoid.me? Nice sane polite bunch of people there - motivates me to keep my ratio above 1!