You are here: ZDNet.co.uk > Reviews > Software > Productivity

SOFTWARETech Guide

Digitising your vinyl

Manek Dubash ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 16 Dec 2002

If you have a sizeable vinyl record collection, you may have bought quite a lot of the music again on CD to get the bonus tracks, hiss-free sound quality and convenience of the CD format. However, shop-bought CDs aren't always the answer. For a start, you can't always find a direct replacement. They're also still far too costly. And there's something about the sound quality of those old vinyl recordings…

So if you've ever wondered what it takes to transfer your vinyl to CD -- what tools you'll need and what the pitfalls are -- you've come to the right place. This article isn't intended to replace product documentation, but to act as a guide to getting the best out of your purchases. Have fun!

Tools for the job

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the tools required, you'll need to check whether your CD player accepts write-once CD-R and/or rewriteable CD-RW discs. Most modern CD players will happily read CD-Rs and some will read CD-RWs too, but if you encounter a problem during initial testing, try changing the brand of CD-R media as their reflectivity does vary.

The tasks to perform break down as follows: record the album; chop it into tracks; clean up the recording; burn the CD; and finally create and print labels. You have two choices at this point: choose a single, multi-purpose package or go for individual best-of-breed tools.

Multi-purpose packages are often economical because there's only one product to buy, and easy to use because there's generally a common interface. However, in our experience, no single product can do the whole job well from start to finish, as the individual modules are rarely the best available. Therefore, since your precious vinyl is involved and you expect to be listening to the results for years to come, we feel that the 'best-of-breed' approach is the most appropriate.

Before buying anything, check that your hardware is up to the job. The more speed your processor can muster the better, since the kinds of waveform transformations required to clean up your audio are very CPU-intensive. It's equally important to maximise the amount of RAM available: audio files are big (an LP side runs to around 400MB), so the more data your PC can hold in memory, the quicker it will run. For similar reasons, clear yourself some hard disk space or buy a new drive.

Our test hardware platform was a 950MHz AMD-based PC with 256MB of RAM, running Windows XP Professional. It had 10GB of free disk space and was fitted with a 'burn-proof' CD writer. You don't need to go for the very fastest CD burner as the speed of today's leading-edge drives is likely to outstrip that of the media -- unless you're willing to pay more for high-speed media. It's best to concentrate on finding a high-quality CD writer rather than the fastest one. We used a Plextor PlexWriter 24/10/40A drive, which plugs directly into a PC's standard IDE interface. If you use a relatively recent notebook system, you'll find that internal CD-R/RW drives are now becoming widely available. External USB CD burners can also be used.

CD writer: Plextor PlexWriter 24/10/40A. Check prices

Not to be forgotten is the sound card, which does all the hard work of converting analogue music into digital signals. We used a Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum, which is designed for DVD-quality audio and has a claimed signal-to-noise ratio of 106dB, plus 24-bit/96kHz digital to audio converters (DACs). This £179.78 (inc. VAT) product includes a drive bay module that brings line-in and headphone sockets to the front of the PC, allowing leads to be easily plugged in.

Sound card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum. Check prices

The next link in the chain is audio acquisition, for which we used Syntrillium's Cool Edit 2000. Downloadable for a reasonable $69 (~ £44), this software allows you to record and edit your music. In terms of ease of use and functionality, as well as supporting the latest, highest-quality DACs, this package offers excellent value for money. Syntrillium's Web site also includes a very helpful and active forum for helping you get the best out of the product.

Audio acquisition: Cool Edit 2000.

Once you've chopped up your vinyl albums into separate tracks, you'll want to clean them up, removing hiss, scratches and other noise. Here, we've found that Steinberg's Clean 4.0 does an excellent job, probably as a result of Steinberg's long history in the music business. Clean 4.0 (£19.99 inc. VAT) easily manages the difficult job of excising unwanted noises while having minimal effect on the music, although its user interface does leave something to be desired.

Audio clean-up: Clean 4.0. Check prices

The easiest part of the job is burning the CD-R -- finally turning the result of all that work into a tangible product. Again, you'll need full control over the task, and we've yet to find a package better than Ahead Software's Nero Burning ROM 5.5. As a bonus, Nero 5.5 also includes a CD labelling module that's as good as any we've seen. The software is easy to use and supports most CD writers, including more modern 'burn-proof' drives that guard against media-wasting buffer under-runs. You can also burn to a disc image, which is useful if, for example, you've run out of CD-Rs and disc space, since it means you can delete both the original and the processed files.

CD writing: Nero Burning ROM 5.5. Check prices

Finally, a point on the legality of this process. This varies from country to country, but there is little case law. Even if copying to CD is technically illegal in your location, in practice, providing it's for your own use, there's little that anyone can do about it.

How to go about it

With all the tools to hand, it's time to start, and the process begins with the turntable. If you don't have a good one, buy or borrow one, since the old adage 'garbage in, garbage out' applies, and there's little you can do later in the process to improve a poor original signal.

Having installed the turntable near your PC and ensured that it's properly set up, plug the output into the phono input of a good-quality amplifier. Then run the tape output from the amp to your sound card's line input. The documentation with some sound cards suggests that you can plug the turntable's phono output directly into the card's microphone input, but we wouldn't recommend this for two reasons. First, a turntable's phono output level is very low, and is therefore easily corrupted -- especially by the radio frequencies (RF) that rattle around inside a PC. Second, a frequency response adjustment, known as RIAA equalisation, needs to be made to all output from vinyl as part of a hiss reduction technique developed in the 1950s -- read more about this here. Your amp's phono stage is designed specifically for this task, so it's best leave it to do the job.

Recording

Fire up your recording software. Double-click on the system tray's volume control to bring up the mixer, and adjust the line-in recording volume so that the highest peaks of the audio signal are around 1dB below the recording maximum. You may need to adjust this slightly as the source changes but, in practice, we found that almost all vinyl is recorded to a similar volume. Some experimentation is clearly needed here. If you're using Cool Edit 2000, adjusting the record level indicator so that it uses only a 45dB range helps to fine-tune volume levels.

Hit the record button and play your record. If it's a multi-track LP, record one whole side at a time and chop it up afterwards -- the time overhead in starting and stopping for each track is high, and some tracks may blend into each other. When saving the first WAV file, create a folder for the LP, otherwise track names can get very long and run the risk of both confusion and getting out of order -- especially when you're dealing with classical music.

Finally, although a modern PC is usually fast enough to multi-task while recording, it's safest to run this as a single task, disabling screensavers and other scheduled operations beforehand. If skips and jumps appear in your recordings, other CPU- and disk-hogging programs are the most likely culprits.

Chopping

Next you need to chop up your 400MB WAV file if you ever want to navigate the resulting CD track by track. In Cool Edit 2000, the quickest way is to use the cue facility. Hitting F8 generates a cue mark and allows you to cut up a long WAV accurately. Cool Edit 2000 can even save and name each track automatically for you, although its default of Track01… isn't usually all that helpful. The main thing at this stage is to concentrate on accurate starts and finishes, using fades to absolute silence. Zoom into the start of a piece of music to get the start right on the first discernable part of the signal. A two-second fade-out works for the end of most recordings, but don't fade out too quickly as you run the risk of losing music, especially if the piece ends sharply -- there's always more reverb than you expect, so use headphones to be certain.

Cleaning

Every vinyl LP has some form of non-musical noise on it: the only issue is how much you can tolerate on your CDs, since cleaning inevitably involves some loss of musical signal. Our advice is: if in doubt, leave the noise alone rather than destroy the signal. You can always take another pass at it if it becomes intolerable, but you can't restore lost signal.

If you do want to clean up your audio, Cool Edit 2000 allows you to edit each click manually and either delete or amend the offending waveform. However, life is way too short for most of us to adopt this route, except for a handful of massive waveform deflections. Instead, there's a number of audio-cleaning programs available. Some sound cards, including Creative's Audigy 2 Platinum, include one, while Syntrillium offers a downloadable plug-in for Cool Edit 2000. The latter is an excellent program, but the best we've come across is Steinberg's Clean 4.0.

Although its non-standard interface isn't the most intuitive, we found the end result to be worth the learning curve. You select how heavily you want Clean 4.0 to scrub the track, and it then works out how much of three types of noise reduction to apply. You can preview and adjust these before processing. The product also allows you to edit tracks and burn a CD, as well as providing a number of other effects and sonic adjustments, most of them not particularly relevant to this project.

Burning

All the tracks for your CD are sitting in a folder and have names you'd like to see on your player's display (when you burn a CD, you can add text that some CD players can pull out and display), which means you're ready to burn. You should also have noted which tracks need to follow on directly from each other (if any). One other small glitch might be that some older CD-R burners are picky about the CD-R media they work with, but anything three years old or less should be fine with any media.

Nero 5.5 includes extensive help, so main tip here is to select the CD-Text option to include the track names. Make sure, too, that you use the DAO (Disc-At-Once) burn option, since this gives you control over track gaps. You might also be able to fit two LPs into a single CD using either 80-minute CD-Rs or a small overburn, which Nero 5.5 supports, or both. Other than that, this software is simple to get to grips with, and, now that most PCs ship with a burner, there are few remaining problems inherent in the technology.

Labelling

The importance you attach to CD labelling depends on how much of a perfectionist you are. Perfectionists will need access to an A3 scanner so you can scan in LP covers; then you'll need to print them out in colour on a laser printer, crop them and insert them into your new CD case. Doing this makes for an attractive result, but is impractical for most people. The biggest stumbling block is scanning 12in.-square objects, although we have generated good results using a standard A4 scanner, scanning two halves of a cover and stitching them together using image editing software such as Adobe's Photoshop. The main thing you'll need here is lots of patience when matching up the two halves.

One alternative is to generate your own CD labels using a word processor. This can be a simple yet effective stop-gap while you summon up the time and patience to go the whole way.

Having generated the image, when you buy CD labels (which are available from most stationers), make sure you purchase a type that's supported by Nero 5.5's CD labelling module -- there's no need to buy a separate software product for this job. You'll also need a CD label applicator, since applying the round, usually slightly curled-up labels to a CD so they're flat and central is awkward by hand.

Finally, most inkjet printers, when coupled with specialist inkjet paper, can produce good results. Get it right before printing if possible, though, since inkjets tend to be on the slow side and are expensive to run.