[kj] Vinyl to mp3 - my way

[Bo Krogsgaard]

On 23 Jan 2004 at 9:44, Lucy Cornwell wrote:

> I use Magix Audio cleaning Lab (cheap and easy) with a Creative Audigy
> soundcard, deck and amp.

This might sound like a slow and tedious process, but i have been doing this stuff for five or 
six years and this is what gives me the best results:

1) I use Wavelab for sampling because it's fast, really fast. Keep in mind that five minutes of 
raw wave audio is 50 megabytes. Wavelab doesn't save the whole file at every single 
change (like Sound Forge and others do), it keeps it all in memory until you choose to save 
it. Speed at the tradeoff of RAM, i have 384 megs so it's fine with me.

2) Then i run the Steinberg Declicker plugin. It's a bit of a bitch to set the right threshold, 
BUT it has this REALLY nice "inverse" function where it only plays you what it intends to 
remove. In that way, you can avoid taking the "punch" out of drums, for instance.

3) If there are severe clicks left, i "punch" them out by hand, usually by marking the click in 
hires zoom mode and lowering the sound 90dB. You can barely hear the small gap 
afterwards, and it helps the normalization.

4) Then i normalize, if needed. I always sample a whole side of a vinyl record in one go, 
because it is safe to assume the record is at the same recording level, unless it's a 
compilation album mastered by a retard.

5) From there, i load the file into Samplitude Studio, and i don't care what you think, it has 
the ULTIMATE noise reduction algorithm. It takes some time to get the hang of it, but god 
damned the results are amazing.

6) And finally, back into Wavelab where i cut it up in tracks. I think the latest Wavelab can 
both save directly to mp3 and burn to CD, but i never use those functions since i prefer 
LAME and CDRWIN for those purposes. LAME is by far the encoder with the highest sound 
quality, and CDRWIN is just an old habit.

Easy? Not at all.
Fast? No way.
Sound quality? Top fucking notch, mates.

If any of you have any questions regarding the above procedure, just drop me a mail and i 
will try to help.


b