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Ripping vinyl or tapes to mp3

Written by Gary Littleton

Monday, 28 May 2007

Q: What do you use to transfer vinyl or cassettes to mp3?

A: Personally, after trying lots of configurations for transferring vinyl and old cassettes, we settled on this one:

We hook a turntable and cassette player directly to the inputs on this DAK audio mixer.

http://www.dak.com/Reviews/2020pics.cfm

Cost of the mixer is approx $70. The output of the mixer we hook directly to the line in audio of our computer. We use Windows XP with the following applications:

http://www.acoustica.com/spinitagain/

What used to take a long time usually takes no time at all with this $34.95 app. I can't recommend it highly enough. It finds the beginning and end of all tracks, previews them for you, lets you easily adjust them, adds noise reduction and various processing, and can save the result as wavs or mp3s. This program is usually all we need.

In those rare instances where need to edit the result more than Spin It Again is capable of, like if a a record skips and we need to edit out the skip (I usually send it to my buddy Terry Carolan for this) or where the sound quality sucks and you really need to play with digital signal processing. Then we use Adobe Audition or the free open souce audio editing application Audacity .

There is also a nice simple looking app that comes with the dak mixer, but I haven't played with it much as I know these latter two apps already.

Cheers,
Gary

Tags: Music Music News Ripping vinyl or tapes to mp3ripping vinyl records cassettes digital analog mp3 wav files
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Comments (1)

	1. 31-05-2007 05:10
	Wow - that sounds perfect Gary! I've heard that a CD recorder isn't nearly as cost-effective as recording directly into a computer, but having my turntable, cassette player, and receiver in an entertainment center makes that option difficult as I can't get behind it easily to access the cables. But I have a second turntable that I could easily hook up to the DAK mixer, if I don't need to involve an amp/receiver in the connection. And I can disconnect my tape player from the stereo fairly easily, allowing me to do the same. And that software you suggested also sounds worth checking out (perhaps after I try the DAK mixer). Thanks for the helpful tip!! Guest Report