Battling Technology....Arrrrgh!

I have several albums that I would like to transfer onto CD, then to an ipod. What do I need to carry out this task?

Swamp

A line out on the stereo (not speaker out) and this plugged into the line in on a sound card on your computer. Some software to record and tweak the sound. Getting the recording levels right is the biggest challenge. You want it as loud (hot) as possible, without going over the limit (clipping). Then cut the recording into tracks and label them. That's it! Yeah, right. It can be pretty easy though. I do find that the only hard part is the recording level and then the rest is just time consuming. There are a few threads here on TC about this process.

Considering the time and expense, you might want to consider whether it would be better to simply purchase the music online and download it directly to your computer and then the iPod.

Arriano - that takes the fun out of it!

Swanks right. I have a mac and run a line from my stereo to the mac. I use Garageband (free software with a mac) to capture the tunes, then transfer to itunes. Garageband is good, but if your record is really snap-crackle-poppy, it won't remove it (unless one of you other mac heads know how to do it - I haven'y figured it out)

For PC you can download a free software called audacity at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
I've never used it, but I heard it worked pretty good

i've used audacity with my ion usb turntable - it's a tad user hostile, but once you get the hang of it it works well.

On 2007-01-09 13:58, arriano wrote:
Considering the time and expense, you might want to consider whether it would be better to simply purchase the music online and download it directly to your computer and then the iPod.

The records I record are not on CD and may never be on CD. The vast majority of music is "dead" this way. I have maybe 8-10 feet of LPs lined up and maybe 25% of it is available to buy through Amazon or Ebay in some form and I bet a tiny fraction of that is available through iTunes.

This is my big gripe with the DMCA and the RIAA. I can certainly understand wanting artists to be paid for music and for there to be a way to get money out of downloads and shares. But, I would like to see some sort of exception for recordings of music that is long out of print. Music that only exists online because someone has the LP, EP, 45 or 78 and recorded onto their computer. And they likely had to buy that record second hand, not new. It was out of print before they were born even. I like to listen to my records in the car. And there's just one way to do that. Record them and burn a CD.

Soapboxery over. That's why we go to the trouble.

A couple years ago, I decided to transfer my 80's music collection from cassettes to my computer (wav format). I found a software called Magix - Audio Cleaning Lab at my local Circuit City. I was able to plug my cassette deck into my computer and create wav files for all the songs from the cassettes. I then used Jukebox (or something similar) to convert the wav to mp3 (which the Magix software couldn't do.) It was relatively simple to perform, though it took a bit of time, since the cassette had to play the song at the regular speed as the computer was creating the file.

The Magix software is decently user friendly, and has modules for transferring from LP, cassette, or CD. There are features you can use to "clean" the recording as well. The cassettes that were recorded and sold by the record company came out very well. My home recordings from LP's or another cassette needed a little "cleaning", but came out very well for my home iPod and computer playing. Once I had my mp3 files on my computer, then I could import them to iTunes and transfer them to my iPod.

Hope this helps! Good Luck, Doug!

• Myke