Copying audio onto CD rom

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I have some audio to be copied onto CD. I have some copying software - Audio Cleaning Lab - and I have an old music centre (with t/t) to play the stuff. Trouble is, the music centre only has a headphone socket.

Can I input the audio into the PC (and copy it) using this jack?

If so, what do I plug the other end into, at the PC? Can I use USB2?

This is a case of seventies stereo meets noughties PC........but it is the only thing I can find with a t/t.

Can I make this work or am I p*ssing in the wind?
 
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securespark said:
I have some audio to be copied onto CD. I have some copying software - Audio Cleaning Lab - and I have an old music centre (with t/t) to play the stuff. Trouble is, the music centre only has a headphone socket.

Can I input the audio into the PC (and copy it) using this jack?

If so, what do I plug the other end into, at the PC? Can I use USB2?

This is a case of seventies stereo meets noughties PC........but it is the only thing I can find with a t/t.

Can I make this work or am I p*ssing in the wind?

----

"Can I input the audio into the PC (and copy it) using this jack?"

GRC - Yes, but you'll need to fiddle with the volume to optimise the recording level. You'll also need to plug the headphone from the music centre (probably a quarter inch jack plug) into the 'line in' on your sound card (probably a 3mm jack plug). Maplin or similar establishment should be able to supply the appropriate lead.

"If so, what do I plug the other end into, at the PC? Can I use USB2?"

GRC - No. USB will expect digital data, not analog music. Plug it into the 'line in' on the sound card.

How many LPs do you need to commit to CD, and what are they? Depending on geography, etc, someone with the same LPs may be able to help.... maybe me. Or is your musical taste a bit .... erm ... "specialised" .....

Regards, Graham
 
Putting all my LP's onto CD was going to be my winter project but I'm a bit busy at the moment to get started. I've found several good sites about the subject such as this one. It looks like the headphone socket goes to the line-in on the sound card. From what I've learned there are better ways to do it but would need a pre-amp although there are some decent ones for about £50.
 
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In some circles (i.e. my house) they reckon that a stand-alone CD recorder is a better bet than the PC. Look at the Pioneer PRD-609 for instance. Philips CD recorders are at low prices from Richer Sounds (or at least they were the last time I looked ....

They wouldn't work from a headphone output though..... you'd need turntable and either a pre-amp, or full amp with tape output to get them to fly ...

Regards, Graham
 
Perhaps more convenient to use but the cd recorder will record all the surface noise from the LP though won't it? I've got the same software as Securespark, Magix Audio Cleaning Lab, and all the pops and crackles can be edited out.
 
Thanks for help so far, peeps!

Graham

As far as my music goes, I have a bit of everything from early Beatles to ELO to Abba, Stevie Winwood, and even some Klaus Nomi.....

J'habite a Stockport.
 
shaggy said:
Perhaps more convenient to use but the cd recorder will record all the surface noise from the LP though won't it? I've got the same software as Securespark, Magix Audio Cleaning Lab, and all the pops and crackles can be edited out.

GRC; Certainly will. Some folks will argue that processing through such software sucks the life out of the sound as well as the pops etc, but that's another story, and probably doesn't enter into it when copying through headphone sockets.........

Regards, Graham
 
securespark said:
... I have a bit of everything from early Beatles to ELO to Abba, Stevie Winwood, and even some Klaus Nomi.....

J'habite a Stockport.

Hmm, not too specialised. Unfortunately non-concurrent with my collection, so I can't offer to burn anything from here, and a bit distant from me in Edinburgh land. Don't want to seem uncharitable, but dare I suggest that catalogue items such as those above would be fairly easy to pick up on CD from EBay, Amazon and other similar sources, thus saving you the trouble of burning the LPs?

Klaus Naomi; I remember an OGWT appearance in the late 1970s..... I don't think anyone who saw it will forget it easily ....

Regards, Graham
 
Have done a bit.
I have some software from Steinberg creative tools -- Clean Plus v.4 -- Do not know where it stands in the techy world, cr*p er wot - not really interested, did the job pretty good - Dehissing and Declicking not too badly of its own violition. Have reasonable results using the headphone socket on record deck to input on the old 'Soundblaster card'. The software came with a 'preamp bundled' using this with the output jack from the turntable made little noticeable difference.
So now I have oldies like 'Peter Gunn', 'Shazam' etc providing some interior tin bashing from the old mobile cd player !!

Also found this useful originally :- http://www.delback.co.uk/lp-cdr.htm
Wealth of info buried in there !!
;)
 
GRC said:
Klaus Naomi; I remember an OGWT appearance in the late 1970s..... I don't think anyone who saw it will forget it easily ....

Know what became of him, Graham?
 
Obviously not !! So once more into the breech !! Naomi or Nomi ?
http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2004/11/10/urgh.html
Klaus Nomi, his final artistic refrain was "Remember me." He said it in a way that was chilling, pathetic, goofy and personal. He knew it and it cut anyone to the core who knew what was going on.
He was one of the first signed artists to die from AIDS. How RCA picked him up I would like to know. When he recorded his album Total Eclipse he obviously knew he was dying from the virus and turned it into this twisted artistic farewell.
If Nomi, He is now quietly contemplating, as we say, the old lid, m8e !!
;)
 
August 6 1983, apparently, at the age of 34. Wow!

One of the first "celebs" to die of AIDS.

Sad, pip, but thanks for that mate.
 
There are three quite different ways of making an audio CD:

1) With an audio CD recorder.

These work just like audio tape recorders except that they write to CD's instead. They sit nicely alongside your other audio equipment, they have all the right connectors and you make your recordings in a familiar manner. The snag is that they use non-standard discs! These are difficult to obtain and cost many times more than standard CDR's when you find them, a problem that can only get worse. When was the last time you saw a Betamax tape for sale?

Perhaps you can now get an audio CD recorder that uses standard discs but there's still a snag. They do not allow much in the way of editing. They will make a CD which sounds exactly like the original LP, and that might be what you want, but you can do better than that.


2) With a computer.

With this approach you first transfer your LPs to hard disk. You can then do as much cleaning up and general editing as you like before writing the finished audio onto standard, cheap CDR's. The trickiest part of this exercise is the first.

Use the best record deck you can lay your hands on; there will be no way to restore sounds that the pickup never even picked up! The best pickups were known as moving coil. Some moving magnet (aka magnetic) pickups were also among the best. The only high grade ceramic cartridge ever made was the Decca Deram - and you must use a genuine Decca stylus.

Use the line input on the best soundcard you can find. I know of no soundcard that can accept a signal direct from a cartridge without making a total mess of it so ---

Use a top notch pre-amp with an input suitable for your cartridge.

DO NOT try to use Windows Sound Recorder. It's a piece of junk fit only for voice recordings through cheap microphones. I recommend a program called Wave Repair. If you use it only for recording then it's free. The repair part is shareware but is well worth trying.

Record each LP side as one big WAV file. You can cut it up later.

WATCH THE LEVEL METERS. I know it's normal on analogue tape decks to allow transients to go 'into the red' but the analogue recording process is very forgiving in this respect. There is a progressive 'squashing down' of the oversized wave peaks. (For the mathematically inclined, the transfer function onto the tape approximates an inverse tangent with its asymptotes at tape saturation.) An overdriven digital system slices the wave peaks straight off and the sound is terrible. KEEP OUT OF THE RED.

Once you have your sound safely tucked away on hard disk - at about 10 Mbytes per minute of audio so you need a big disk - you can clean it up as much as you like. Wave Repair is good for this.

The final step is to write the finished CD. You normally get CD writing software free when you buy a CD writer but, if you didn't, you can get Record Now free from HP's website - if you can find it! Be warned that, on my writer at least (HP 9150i), Record Now cuts two seconds from the end of the last track. You can get round this by adding a two second silence to it beforehand.
After all the effort you've put in you will of course use good quality blank CD's!


3) Pay somebody else to do it.

This could be a good option if you don't have the time or equipment but apart from the cost there are some important questions to ask:

What kind of disks will they record onto?

How much cleaning up, if any, will they do? Steep cut base and treble filters - the rumble and scratch filters of bygone days - DO NOT constitute cleaning up.

Will you get your original LP's back. This may sound obvious but some obscure copyright law might say that you can't have them.

And finally ---

There are many websites out there dedicated to the whole business of transferring LP to CD. Try these for starters:

www.delback.co.uk
www.cdrfaq.org
 
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