Ripping vinyl to mp3?

[CyberHippie]

Someone was asking me the best way to rip vinyl to mp3. Not having ever done this I have no idea.

I mean I know that you could plug your stereo into the input of your sound card, play the record, while running that windows record app. But there has got to be a better way, no?

[Esau]

But there has got to be a better way, no?

I don't think there is,although I could be wrong.Just like a cassette you have to transfer it in "real time" right,aside from the type of equipment (high end vs. low end) I can't think of a better way to do it.

[bradm]

No, that's pretty much it. Generally, you'd plug a "Y" cable with two RCA plugs on one end and a 1/8" stereo plug on the other, with the RCA plugs going into the "rec out" jacks from your amp/receiver, and the 1/8" stereo plug going into the "line in" jack on the sound card.

IIRC, though, the Windows recorder app stops at one minute, so if you want something longer, you need a different recording application. The sound card may have come with one (I have a Creative Soundblaster Audigy, which came with a recording application), but if it didn't, a good one is CD Wave.

Aloha,

Brad

[Dynamo]

As far as I know, this is the only way. You might want to look into better audio software so that you can tweak what you transfer...

Outside of that, I couldn't suggest anything else...

[AdamH]

I've been thinking about doing this...would hard drive space be an issue if you want CoolEdit to do an entire side at once?

[TheGoodRev]

I've done it before, and it's pretty much as described above. One thing you have to remember though is that phono level is lower than line level which is lower than mic level. So like Brad said, you'd have to use the output from your receiver into the computer, as opposed to the output directly from the turntable. I also have a Radio Shack RCA->RCA preamp for turntables; I used it before I had an old receiver, and my stereo only had line inputs. If you put that between the turntable and the computer you'll be golden.

I use CoolEdit too and it does a great job, easy to adjust levels and tweak with hissing and popping. Of course you should give it a couple trial runs for a minute or too to make sure the level doesn't clip when the music gets too loud.

As for drive space, you won't find anything that will rip directly to MP3. CoolEdit and all the others will rip to PCM WAV and you would have to use Lamedrop or Foobar to encode to MP3. One minute of two-channel stereo WAV is 10MB of space, so for a 56-minute LP (that's the max time on a 33rpm I believe), you're looking at 560 MB. I guess you only need half that space free if you're doing one side at a time, but don't forget that if you're encoding afterwards you'll need enough space to hold both the WAVs and the MP3s/FLACs at the same time on your hard drive, because the program won't erase the WAVs until after the encoding is done. That's not such a big deal for MP3s, compared to WAVs they're not that big; for FLACs though, they're about 70% of the WAV size so you should take that into account. Good luck eh, let us know how it works out.