Digitizing Vinyl
I have quite a lot of vinyl. I fully intend to keep it. And treasure it. Someone at work quizzed me recently about why I bother to digitize it. good question. Here’s my rationale.
- Much of my collection is not available on cd or as a download (legal or not), so I see this as an obvious way to preserve it
- I actually listen to a ton of it, and sure its nice to be able to listen to it where my turntables can’t go
- I kind of enjoy the ritual of taking the trouble to go through side by side, track by track, digitizing it in real time. It relaxes me. Listening to it takes me back to when I first heard it, like flipping through my musical memories.
I use a ION turntable with USB straight into my laptop and use the software (audacity) provided, to capture the album, scrub out clicks, hiss and kind of major blemish.
Then manually go through and enter track breaks and names. Finally, copy the WAV files with tags onto m hard drive and then into iTunes.
Usually, the tags get lost (anyone any tip how to avoid this?), so I run through in iTunes info, update each track, and voila, c’est ca.
Will post a recent end product of my labor next time.
john
From The Other Side of the Mirror 