Mp3 faq - How do I record from vinyl disks

How do I record from vinyl disks?

Connecting the output from a magnetic phono cartridge directly into a sound card probably is not going to work very well. The output from a magnetic cartridge is very low level. Not only that, but it also has some inherent frequency distortions, which the pre-amp circuits in your stereo are designed to correct for.

You either need to use some sort of pre-amp designed to take input from a magnetic cartridge and produce line level outputs (I have an old one I bought from Radio Shack, but I'm not sure that they sell them any more). If you can't use a pre-amp... then you don't have much choice but to run a line out from your receiver... or to record to tape, and then connect, say, the headphone jack from a walkman to the line-in of your sound card (those levels match pretty well - just turn the walkman volume right down at first, then turn it up gradually until you get a good level). If you have any kind of mixer laying around, they often have inputs for "Magnetic phono" also - so you could plug your turntable into the mixer "Magnetic phono" input and then connect the line-out from the mixer into your sound card...

Once you get a connection that works, you'll need a WAV editing / recording program to record with. Goldwave (www.goldwave.com) is a good one.

You may also want to use specialised software to clean up the effects of scratched on your disks - there are several program to do this. The program names that I am aware of are:

LP Cleaner
Groove Mechanic
Popfix
Glitch Eliminator

You can download all of them through the ZDNet software library at www.hotfiles.com - just search for the names.

Then you'll need an MP3 encoder to actually change your WAV files to MP3 files. You can download CDEX from www.cdex.n3.net and it will let you encode WAV files to MP3 using either the Blade or the LAME encoder.

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