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Hi,
My middle-aged PC (Athlon 700 / 256Mb / 30 Gig) has no sound card and I
want to buy one. I also want to transfer some of my favourite vinyl to
CD. Can I do this with a basic soundcard + software or would I do
better to buy a more advanced soundcard maybe with its associated
software?
Get a good phono pre-amp and hook that between your turntable and PC's sound
card. I can't recommend a sound card since I use my old Sony Minidisc deck
to do the analog to digital conversion then feed its optical digital output
into my PC sound card's optical digital input. I like the fact that I can
use the Minidisc decks VU meters instead of the ones on the PC recording
software. So for me, I got a really cheap sound card that had an optical
digital input (and optical digital output for going the other way).
For software I typically use:
CD Wave (
http://www.milosoftware.com/cdwave/) - Shareware recording and
splitting software. Insures that track splits are on the correct boundaries
for burning Audio CD's so you won't hear a click or pop when you split
tracks on an album that doesn't have silence between the tracks. There is
no time limit to the trial period on this shareware. I record as a .wav
file.
Depopper (
http://www.droidinfo.com/software/depopper/) - Shareware to remove
clicks and pops from vynil which has been recorded as a .wav file. I
typically run this before I split the album into tracks. It will take a
while to run on your older PC, so try it with a short piece of music first,
so you can get a feel for how the settings work. The downside is the UI
isn't very easy to use. You enter numbers for a lot of the settings and
it's hard to get a feel for what numbers you ought to use. Also, it's got a
30 day trial period before you need to pay for it. But I think it's worth
the price, once you find settings that work well for the music you've got.
Audacity (
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) - Freeware (open source) audio
recording and editing program. Works reasonably well, but I find I don't
typically use it for vinyl to CD type work as it's harder to use than CD
Wave for recording and track splitting and I never figured out how to remove
clicks and pops without a lot of manual editing. It's easy to use Audacity
to "amplify" the sound so the peak is at 0 decibels. I typically do this on
an album side after running Depopper since pops tend to be the loudest part
of the .wav file. The upside is it's free and it's pretty good for actual
music editing. I typically use it for cutting music down to a shorter time
for my daughter's dance team (usually they're limited to a couple of minutes
per routine).
So I typically do this:
1. Record a side of an album as a .wav using CD Wave making sure that you
don't get clipping.
2. Run that .wav through Depopper go get rid of clicks and pops.
3. Run that .wav through Audacity to "amplify" the .wav to get the peak at
0 decibels (no clipping).
4. Run that .wav through CD Wave to split it into tracks and give each of
them a name (typically something like "01 - First track name.wav", "02 -
Second track name.wav", and etc. If you also want an .mp3, CD Wave will
work with the Lame MP3 encoder so when you're splitting the tracks, you can
get both .wav and .mp3 tracks.
5. Burn the CD using the .wav tracks using whatever CD recording software
you wish (I use whatever came with my CD/DVD Burner). I burn "Disc at once"
so you don't get unwanted gaps between the tracks. With today's high speed
CD-R's, I typically burn at 8x, which seems to work well in my 90's era and
newer CD players that will play CD-R's.
Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)