Analog to digital conversion hardware.

newbie308

Hi folks,
I have a significant quantity of old bootleg vinyl, and I'd like to be able to listen to it on my MP3 player. I also have casette recordings of my highschool rock band that I'd like to preserve and share with others. There are a lot of products on the market (mostly software with some kind of USB adapter) that allow these recordings to be converted to digital media, but I don't know where to begin with so many options.

Any experience and or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

newbie308

Man! 24 hours and no responses! I guess I'll have to blaze my own trail here? I was hoping that someone could reccomend a brand that they have used that would not be a waste of money or some Ebay gimmic. I have a turn table, and a quality computer, so I guess I'll try one of the software packages from Office Depot for $50!

heiney9

Be sure whatever software you buy it has comprehensive editing capabilities. Taking a full .wav program and then adding a table of contents and track indexes is imperrative. Also be aware this is extremely time consuming as the transfer has to be done in real time.

At one time I used Audacity Sound Forge to copy many of my bootlegs. It was tedious and very time consuming. This was 10 years ago and computer are faster and have more storage capabilities now so I'm sure it's a little less tedious. Still the analog has to be transfered in real time.

As far as TT, you'll need some sort of phono equalizer. Cassettes are pretty much plug-n-play with a typical patch cord. Or perhaps now the RCA has to be converted to USB. Honestly, I found all my bootlegs and more digitally so I stopped transfering analog about 8 years ago so I'm not up on the latest methods.

Perhaps a USB TT is in order if you have that much vinyl.

H9

Big Dawg

Keiko rips vinyl regularly

Marty913

newbie308 wrote: »

Man! 24 hours and no responses! I guess I'll have to blaze my own trail here? I was hoping that someone could recommend a brand that they have used that would not be a waste of money or some Ebay gimmick. I have a turn table, and a quality computer, so I guess I'll try one of the software packages from Office Depot for $50!

I did quite a few last year and will probably get back into it soon as I've picked up several albums recently at Flea Markets. Anyway, I took the H9 approach and bought a USB turntable (Audio Technica AT-LP50-USB) that has the appropriate equalizer built in. The successor model the LP60 sells for about $82 on Amazon. I did not care for the software that came with it so I used an old standby freebee (Audiograbber). I did purchase an inexpensive program called DePopper ($18) that has some fairly extensive pop/hiss removal functions. Highly recommended. On occasion I also used the free version of WavePad for some minor trimming.

As H9 noted, it's a "real-time" experience so it can take some time. Some of the programs I tried did a fair job of splitting tracks automatically but most can mistake drops in volume as track-breaks. Doing track splitting manually can be tedious but I prefer it to the "automatic process".

Once I have the WAV files where I want them, I use MediaMonkey to do any required conversions. Usually I convert first to FLAC (lossless) and once I have that in MediaMonkey, I just generate the MP3 or WMA for portable devices as needed. I make sure I keep the FLAC's permanently so I don't ever have to do the ripping again.

heiney9

Recording a properly mastered and indexed LP is a whole lot different that copying bootleg LP's or tapes. I basically had 42-45minutes of each side of a cassette that was continuous. I recorded each side of the cassette as a single .WAV file and then used the software to manually insert track indexes when I would do the final burn to cdr. That was effing tedious, time consuming and you had to break it down into milliseconds. Many times it took over 5 or 6 tries to pinpoin the exact time when one song switched to the next. These are bootlegs that are basically unedited and one continuous side of a cassette or LP.

Also since mine were almost exclusively Zeppelin bootlegs in the 2-3-4 hour range, sometimes I had to re-arrange and/or splice long songs together like Dazed and Confused or No Quarter or the WLL medley. Managing the time as well as keeping the original set running order, splicing two halves of songs back together, cutting and pasting entire songs, etc, etc....doing editing like crowd fades at the end, etc,etc......is waht I mean by tedious.

If the tracks you have are just singular tracks already mastered which you are just transferrring from analog to digital that's pretty much a piece of cake these days comparatively.

Not to say waht Keiko does with his vinyl drops isn't time consuming. But it's nowhere near as tedious as deconstructing and then reconstructing a continous .WAV file.

H9

thsmith

http://www.needledoctor.com/Furutech-GT-40-Headphone-Amp-DAC

brgman

Marty913 wrote: »

I did quite a few last year and will probably get back into it soon as I've picked up several albums recently at Flea Markets. Anyway, I took the H9 approach and bought a USB turntable (Audio Technica AT-LP50-USB) that has the appropriate equalizer built in. The successor model the LP60 sells for about $82 on Amazon. I did not care for the software that came with it so I used an old standby freebee (Audiograbber). I did purchase an inexpensive program called DePopper ($18) that has some fairly extensive pop/hiss removal functions. Highly recommended. On occasion I also used the free version of WavePad for some minor trimming.

As H9 noted, it's a "real-time" experience so it can take some time. Some of the programs I tried did a fair job of splitting tracks automatically but most can mistake drops in volume as track-breaks. Doing track splitting manually can be tedious but I prefer it to the "automatic process".

Once I have the WAV files where I want them, I use MediaMonkey to do any required conversions. Usually I convert first to FLAC (lossless) and once I have that in MediaMonkey, I just generate the MP3 or WMA for portable devices as needed. I make sure I keep the FLAC's permanently so I don't ever have to do the ripping again.

How did you do the splitting of tracks??

heiney9

brgman wrote: »

How did you do the splitting of tracks??

The software comes with tools for that.

Back when I was using Adobe Audition (10 years ago) you would type a string of numbers into a "cue sheet" while setting up the burn parameters.

soemthing like this

"[01]" - 00:00:00; 03:09:43
"[02]" - 03:09:44; 06:19:27
"[03]" - 06:19:28; 09:44:02

and so on. This was a manual cue sheet and you could choose to leave a gap (determined by you) or go gapless.

The above indicate the precise spots to put the track breaks and assemble a typical cd table of contents, with the 1,2,3, etc being the track number.

Those time stamps were derived by listening to the .WAV file and then manually making notes as to where you wanted one song to end and the other to begin.

Very tedious and time consuming trying to hunt and peck for song breaks in an 80+ minute continuous .WAV file. And then having to manually write the string without making mistakes was tedious as well.

I haven't used anything newer, but I would assume much of the same process is needed to do it manually even with today's programs. How does the computer know where to put the track info if you don't tell it. How will you know unless you listen to the entire WAV to find out where the cue marks should be.

H9

brgman

Thanks heiney.I have hundreds of DAT tapes i have been transferring and the fact that they are live shows i have no breaks and havent found any easy way to put track numbers in.Audacity has it but it was like rocket science to me.

BlueFox

http://www.benchmarkmedia.com/adc/adc1-usb

heiney9

brgman wrote: »

Thanks heiney.I have hundreds of DAT tapes i have been transferring and the fact that they are live shows i have no breaks and havent found any easy way to put track numbers in.Audacity has it but it was like rocket science to me.

It is a major PITA because it's time consuming. For every 1 hour of bootleg material it took me about 4+ hours to get it ready to burn to a cdr. Burning the final image with a proper TOC (table of contents) was easy part. Prepping the continuos WAV file into a useable digital format is what takes soooooooo long.

H9

P.s. Not to mention all the hours spent learning how to use the software. It's not for the faint of heart. Again needle drops of standard LP's is fairly straight forward comparatively.

heiney9

BlueFox wrote: »

http://www.benchmarkmedia.com/adc/adc1-usb

Ok so that's the conversion engine..............all the rest I mentioned still has to take place once the WAV file is created on the computer. I'm not so sure such an expensive device is needed for bootleg recordings unless they are mutiple track or superb recordings.

H9

heiney9

Oh yeah, if you are a perfectionist like I am...........double tedious, because it had to be perfect everytime.

Marty913

brgman wrote: »

How did you do the splitting of tracks??

Audiograbber will do the "needle-drop" method for individual tracks, or for an entire side. I used both methods. If I only wanted 2-3 tracks off an album side I would do each track individually. If I wanted most/all of the album side there were two methods I used.

The first method was to let Audiograbber automatically split the tracks based on the silence between them. Up front you can list the artist & album name and each track name. When splitting, the program will name each WAV accordingly. Then I would verify the split was done correctly. If not you have the choice of redoing the track or using WavePad to correct it.

The second method is to create one continues WAV file (ie: do not split tracks). Once the WAV file is created you can either burn it, or use WavePad to split it yourself manually marking / naming / saving each track.

If you decide to play around with Audiograbber (and/or DePopper) I can email you a couple of PDF files I have on the process. They aren't especially detailed but they will save you some research time.

heiney9

FTR, many times there is no silence on a bootleg LP so the only option you have is to burn a continuous WAV and go back and manually insert the track indexes, same with tapes. To add even more aggravation typically the bootleg tapes would be close to 90 minutes long.........too long to fit on a single cdr, so then I had to start rearranging tracks by cutting and pasting portions of the WAV and attaching it at the front of the next WAV.

This was to maximize the use of cdr's capcacity and keep the correct running order of the bootleg concert.

brgman

With DAT tapes i could run up to 3 hour shows uncut.Now it's a nightmare to monitor even putting them on CD.Gotta do it before any tape degradation sets in though.

heiney9

brgman wrote: »

With DAT tapes i could run up to 3 hour shows uncut.Now it's a nightmare to monitor even putting them on CD.Gotta do it before any tape degradation sets in though.

That was my motivation as well. I had 350 concerts on cassette tape. I took my top 25 and transferred them. But about 6 years ago once cable speed arrived I picked up everything available, all from digital sources, within 2 years, off the internet and I didn't use bit torrents or pay the ungodly prices bootleggers get for cds.

Dl'd them from all over the net for free. I now have better, more complete versions of all of the shows I used to have on cassette.

H9

brgman

I have upgraded some as well but i have a few hundred masters i did myself and those are the ones i am working on first.Also lots of others are not out in the free world.
Lotsa work.
Wintertime work!