How to Bring Your Vinyl in the Digital World
07.18.07 By Collin DavidI regret to inform you that your vinyl collection is doomed. The more you love it, appreciate it, listen to what it has encoded into its grooves, the faster the cruel turntable stylus is going to carve away microscopic bits of data from the record itself. With every pass of metal-against-plastic, friction degrades your music. Unfortunately, there are still music performances on vinyl that haven’t made the leap to CD or mp3 formats, which are far more enduring (however also far less romantic) means of data storage.
The answer to surviving this degradation is to break out your old records for one last go. Embark on one last frictional farewell through the grooves - but this time, hook your turntable up to your computer and record the sound directly into a digital format. In this way, the music enjoyed for years to come without endangering the source material.
Now, I’m on a Mac computer, so this mini-tutorial is geared towards those of us on the Light Side of the Force, but the principles are universal. You’re going to need :
- a turntable with RCA ‘line out’ jacks
- a Dual RCA to Stereo (Male) cable
- a Griffin iMic
- a free USB port on your computer
- a little program called Audio Hijack.
The previously mentioned Numark PT-01 Turntable has the requisite audio jacks, and if you have any kind of electronics around the house, chances are that you have the RCA-to-Stereo cable in a drawer somewhere too, given to you as an extra part from some other device.
Of course, the first thing to do it to hook all of these crazy future-things up in sequence, all of which perform the function of translating the analog sound from the vibrating needle of your turntable, and into a format that your computer can understand. The rounded, circular RCA ends of the ‘RCA / Stereo’ cable get plugged into the ‘line out’ jacks on the turntable itself, and the other end of this cable (with the single plug) gets plugged into the Griffin iMic.
The Griffin iMic has two places where you can plug this cable in. On older models, these are marked by icons for a microphone & a stereo speaker, as well as a switch to choose between them. Plug the cord into the jack with the ‘microphone’ icon, making sure that the switch is positioned towards said icon. The jack with the ‘stereo’ icon is more for sounds coming out of the computer - and we’re sending sounds in. The newer models are slightly different, but also suitably self-explanatory.
The iMic’s USB cable (the wide, rectangle one attached to the iMic itself) gets plugged into your computer, which will usually recognize it as an external device and be immediately ready to take audio input. If you’re working from a Windows computer, you might need to install the software that comes with the iMic, but you’re on your own there. I dare not to tread in the chaotic, syrupy mess that is making sense of Windows. Now, your computer is ready to listen.I legally purchased a copy of Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba Software (linked above) for 16 bucks, and it’s been a great investment.
The user interface is completely intuitive & it’s done a great job recording my records into a variety of formats - though mostly mp3 and AIFF (which is the format the CDs are usually in). Not only can you record vinyl into your computer using Audio Hijack - but you can record audio from any source that your computer can hear. Input possibilities include your radio, a microphone, the TV, podcasts, and audio that streams into your browser (without given you the option of saving those awesome sound files directly). You can snag songs from MySpace pages and put them on your iPod, and other such things involving modern lingo and odd capitalizations.
Once you select an audio source from the menu on the left of the AudioHijack screen, and hit the ‘HIJACK’ button, your computer will start to listen to the source and play it back for you. Hit ‘RECORD’ and it’ll start to make a file of the sound - and it’s that simple. You can edit the sounds that you’ve captured using things like Quicktime Pro (to cut out extra bits at the beginnings and ends of recordings) and SoundSoap. SoundSoap is a popular (but expensive) program that will help you remove pops and crackles from your recordings, but it’s far from magic, and you’ll end up losing a lot general fidelity in the process.
With this process, I’ve archived a vast number of albums, and it barely takes longer than the actual listening time of the album. Your process may different slightly, but there’s the general layout of it. Save those records while you can, and by all means, ENJOY THEM!
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Article Tags: Audio Hijack, conversion, Digital, digitize, preservation, vinyl================
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July 18th, 2007 at 8:02 am
Great article! I’ve been ripping vinyl for quite some time now. Not to mention that some years ago I was converting some of my cassette tapes to mp3s, quality sucked big time, but who cares…