OT Vinyl to MP3

I've done this with a PC for myself and for friends with irreplaceable records that will never be available on a CD. Sound boards don't have much in the way of amplification for a turntable cartridge, so I use a pre-amp with RIAA equalization. My memory is a little foggy here, but records are cut with a funny frequency response to compensate for the medium itself, which an RIAA pre-amp compensates for while amplifying the signal. I built an inexpensive Vellerman kit but its only one-chip deal. A little embarassed about buying a kit, but I was in a hurry. It was only like $12US and about 6.00 of hardware and a wall wart I had lying around. I think you can buy one built for 20-40$. NOTE: you MAY be able to do the RIAA equalization in software, and MAYBE a MAC has a pre-amp built in. Unless you have a truly outstanding turntable, a great cartridge and needle, and absolutely virgin (and darned good quality to begin with) albums, you will WANT to clean up the sound. On a PC, the S/N ratio of a cheap sound card isn't very good going in or out. Good boards like boards made for this purpose or higher end Turtle Beach boards have multilayer, thoughtful designs and separate isolated linear power supplies actually designed by analog engineers, not "catalog engineers". You'll have to decide if what you have is OK or if you need something better. No point on spending big bucks on it if worse noise is coming from somewhere else. Take the ground connection on the turntable seriously! Makes a big difference. The software you get with a "one button vinyl-cleanup" is OK (like Adaptec's, which they licensed), but there is better software out there that lets you play with the noise in a graphical, scope-like manner. Problem is, this takes time and some talent. Do this for a while and you will see how audio engineers can spend weeks on just one record project like this. The "automatically make CD tracks from record cuts" feature in a lot of software looks for pauses, making it fail on classical music and also on bad vinyl, which is probably what you have. Record the whole thing and cut apart the tracks yourself. Setting the sound levels is tricky, especially from record to record. You don't want to record too low (and lose dynamic accuracy), or too high (and get distortion). Again, unless you have outstanding equipment, one channel will be louder on average, and good software can adjust for this. I think for the time you will put in, you would be best off making a true CD of your efforts, and then MP3'ing that. Costs a quarter extra these days. VBR (variable bit rate?) type MP3's are very, very good; these days with cheap storage, silicon and otherwise, I don't see any reasons to use less than 192Kbps straight which, to my ear, is just fine for all except the most critical recordings. Unfortunately, when I made or obtained most of mine, the software I had could do only 128kbps, which makes even some rock music sound bad, particularly cymbals, snares, etc. Just my $0.02USD. --- Glen Goodwin <acme_ent(a)bellsouth.net> wrote: __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games http://sports.yahoo.com