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Hi all, I'm new to all this and looking for some advice and hoping people here will be able to help me.
I am going to try to covert all my fathers vinyl to a digital audio for him as a kind of birthday present.
I don't really want to buy any extra hardware or software to do the job.
The hardware isn't really a problem. I know its not going to give the same quality as professional equipment. But I've got a creative X-Fi Elite pro sound card, so will use the phono connections on the external console to connect to the amp.

I mainly need help with the computer side of things. If possible could someone recommend a good peice of freeware the is good for cpaturing audio, it obviously only needs to record from 1 source and in stero. I also need to know what format to capture the audio in? Whats the best uncompressed format to capture into? What sample rate to use? what bit rate?
I'm not worried about keeping it at CD quality as I'm aiming to keep it on the computer so there isn't any limitations of getting a certain number of tracks onto a CD etc. So I intend to capture in the best lossless format and then covert to a sample rate compressed format after (probably mp3, or wma, but if there is a better well supported format that would be more suitable, please advise).
If any of you could help it would be most appreicated.
Cheers
CC

Comments

drumist69 Sun, 05/27/2007 - 16:35

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

That should do what you need. It will capture in WAV files, and can output as MP3 (if I remember right). It also has some noise removal tools if you've got a super-crackly record. You just select a sample of the noise/hiss (say from the start of the record), and it will filter that stuff out. Sometimes it works well, sometimes, not so well. Check it out! Andy

drumist69 Mon, 05/28/2007 - 08:12

WAV is pretty much the standard for recording. If you're converting vinyl to CD's, then 44.1 Khz sample rate, and either 16 bit or 24 bit would be fine. I haven't used Audacity in a while, so I can't remember what kind of range of options it has for bit depth and sample rate. Those things will also depend on what sample rate and bit depth your sound card does. BTW I looked at the Audacity site, and it seems they upgraded the noise removal since I last encountered it, so you should have fun with it! Andy