A Treasure Trove of Vinyl in my Dad's closet

My mom has been holding on to my father's album collection since he passed 7 years ago, and would not allow me even to go through it to see if there was anything I wanted. Keep in mind, my mother has not owned a turntable for at least 15 years. This past weekend, she finally let me look through it and agreed to let me have some of them on the condition that I would find a way to get them put onto CDs for her.

Hidden between the Arthur Fiedler, Ray Conniff, and "Living Strings" albums, I found some great exotica. Namely Arthur Lyman's Taboo and Bwana-a, as well as several Martin Denny albums. There are also some cool Henry Mancini, other lounge, and good latin jazz albums. We decided to leave the records at her place for now because I had a 4-hour drive home in hot weather and we weren't sure the records would survive the drive in the trunk of the car (tiny trunk with no space for the albums to lay flat), or on the seat with the top down on the convertible. I'll bring them home when I go back during cooler weather. I'm looking forward to putting these old gems to good use.

If anyone in the bay area has the technology to convert vinyl to CD, please let me know! I can provide the CDs and pay for your time!

JenTiki, it's really not too hard to get vinyl to CD. All you need is a way to connect your turntable to your computer and some freeware/shareware software to record it. I think a company called Griffin had an interface which allowed you to connect a turntable to a Mac which was called an iMic. It was pretty cheap too if I recall. There's also interfaces available for PCs as well. If you can spring for 100 bucks there are a couple of USB turntables out there as well that do a very adequate job and many of those come bundled with software.

As for software, it seems the hands-down shareware/freeware software is Audacity (google search for the site). It takes a little bit to noodle the settings the way you like it, but is very deep considering it's basically free. There are also a bunch of filters you can download which can do some interesting things to clean-up the tracks. All this sounds a little tedious, but once you do it a couple of times, it's not that bad. The most time consuming part of the process is just physically recording the vinyl (well, maybe a little hyperbole there).

BTW, for all those 78 fanatics out there with old Hawaiian records, Audacity allows you to record them at the 45 speed (since most modern turntables don't have 78), and then converts the recording to the proper speed through software processing. Pretty cool, eh?

Thanks for the advice Quikiki! I don't currently have a turntable, but am planning to pick up one of the USB turntables bundled with software in a couple months when I pick up the albums. Who knows ... if I time it around the holidays, maybe I can get my mom to give it to me as a gift since she's the one who wants everything on CD! :wink:

JenTiki,

NICE collection of stuff you got there! And what a fabulous story! I've heard good things about the USB turntables, so I think that'll work out for you.

On 2009-09-08 10:50, JenTiki wrote:
Hidden between the Arthur Fiedler, Ray Conniff, and "Living Strings" albums...

btw Esquivel made a Living STrings LP called "In a Mellow Mood," so keep an eye out for that. Also if he had any "Living Brass" in that record pile , those records are usually really good, especially if arranged by Ray Martin! In the "Living" series, The Living Guitars and the Living Marimbas aren't bad either.

And all is not lost with Ray Conniff. Look for LPs that contain "Shaft,""Bah Bah Conniff Sprach" (his version of 2001), "Temptation,""Music to Watch Girls By," "The Good the Bad and the Ugly," "Theme to S.W.A.T," and his version of the "Hustle." And of course S'Wonderful is a solid LP, as is Ray Conniff's Hawaiian Album. Lots more Conniff suggestons here http://www.kfai.org/node/10119

You're on your own with Arthur Fiedler I'm afraid :)

~glen