Ripping vinyl to mp3: Advice please.

[daddy mchectic]

Any tips or advice would be great. Also, is the recording usually good enough to play in a club? Help on getting a better quality sound would be very nice. Cheers.

[jam1]

I'm being helped by a couple of mates to record some bits at the moment. Basically, get some good quality needles (Stanton 890 with elliptical styli is what I'm using), record them as loud as possible without clipping and then, if you have the ability to, limit them a few dB so they are nice and loud!

[gravity]

I'm being helped by a couple of mates to record some bits at the moment. Basically, get some good quality needles (Stanton 890 with elliptical styli is what I'm using), record them as loud as possible without clipping and then, if you have the ability to, limit them a few dB so they are nice and loud!

dont fucking do this vinyls are already mastered and therefore limited, probably by someone who knows what they are doing. just record at as high a level as possible and if its still a bit low normalize it to 0db.

[Sharmaji]

^ disagree entirely.

first and foremost, QUALITY. use a good turntable w/ a good motor, and good needles. your parents' old plastic turntable w/ the built-in cartridge is NOT good-- gonna be noise city. 1200s and similar are fine; in theory, there'll be mechanical noise from the direct drive, but in reality it's pretty negligable.

use a good mixer or phono preamp, good cable, and the best possible analog-to-digital conversion you can. Going into your computers soundcard will most likely not be good enough, you'll again get mechanical noise, and mostly likely some crappy aliasing.

record at 24 bit, and try to get a clean and balanced signal. The goal is to reduce noise, as close to the beginning of the chain as possible. high-output cartridges help... If you need to get gain, get it from the cleanest gain source you have-- if it's a great mixer, then adjust the gain or output volume there.

record at about -3 so as to not induce digital distortion on the signal.

I usually limit 1-2 dB on a vinyl recording, for a couple reasons. first and foremost is to get it up to an average level, compared w/ similar material. secondly, vinyl's often mastered to +4db, meaning that you get 4db more volume out of a vinyl recording than you can from a digital file. Thus-- things don't need to be limited as much on a vinyl recording, and you have some leeway there, when you bring it back into the digital domain.

normalizing usually won't do anything, especially if there is even a single spike that hits you at 0db; you're just running a process that has no real value.

on older records that were questionably pressed (early 90s dancehall reggae, i'm looking at you), i've definitely done some re-mastering for my own collection-- some dynamic control and added high end can help.

[gravity]

hmmm i see your point but limiting already mastered material seems questionable to me tbh. maybe not with badly done stuff per se, but thats a different story really - and i expect the exception if we are dealing with fairly modern music.

i guess -3 would probably be a decent enough level to come in, obviously you wont be wanting distortion. this is why i said to normalize, as if you are peaking at less than 0 then you can turn it up without any clipping. i suppose i'm not factoring in vinyl imperfections here such as pops and crackles though, where you can get peaks that are not related to the music - i guess a limiter could be handy then. but i certainly wouldn't wanna limiter to be kicking in below where the actual music is peaking.

if its a bit quiet you do generally have a gain control on your mixer. use it.

oh yeah, deffo best needles/tables/pre/interface available on the way in.

[rob sparx]

I'm being helped by a couple of mates to record some bits at the moment. Basically, get some good quality needles (Stanton 890 with elliptical styli is what I'm using), record them as loud as possible without clipping and then, if you have the ability to, limit them a few dB so they are nice and loud!

dont fucking do this vinyls are already mastered and therefore limited, probably by someone who knows what they are doing. just record at as high a level as possible and if its still a bit low normalize it to 0db.

I disagree - although vinyl masters have already been limited the transition to vinyl makes up to about 2db of extra peaks appear which are not doing anything extra for the volume. These peaks can be clipped without any real noticable difference to the sound as long as a good transparent limiter is used - cool edit/adobe auditions hard limiter works for me, b4 doing this I use same softwares click/pop remover to get rid of any unwanted sounds from the needle or errors on the vinyl (it happens!) which can be much louder than the peak volume of the tune so not good. Its important not to limit too much as once the limiter starts cutting into the loudest sounds kick/snare/sub then the sound becomes squashed which is very bad news, I usually chop off peaks by about 1.5db then normalise (or add volume in limiting process so peaks are squashed by 1.5db no difference really) - this will leave a vinyl sounding slightly quieter than the average digital recording but not too different.

Makes mixing easier if the volumes are not too far apart (some digital tunes ridiculously loud these days) and as long as you are careful with making this happen it won't noticably affect sound quality. Also even if you are just listening to tunes at home (all about the washing up compilations!) its nice to not have volumes jumping all over the place too much - im just trying to explain this in a practical sense all very good reading about 1s and 0s but in the real world some very slight "degradation" of sound is pretty much unnoticable.

[rob sparx]

i suppose i'm not factoring in vinyl imperfections here such as pops and crackles though, where you can get peaks that are not related to the music - i guess a limiter could be handy then.

As I just posted cool edit (or adobe audition) click/pop eliminator is the dogs bollox, you don't use the actual process button on the plugin just highlight the offending area of the wav as precisely as possible select the plugin and click the large "big click" button (if its not clickably try changing the area you have selected make it smaller). The click/pop eliminator can also be used to get rid of digital clicks from zero crossing problems or on larger areas to get rid of transients can't recommend it enough plus the cool edit hard limiter is the only one id trust to process vinyl with at least compared with any of the vst options (may be some other standalone program limiters as good)

[staticcast]

hmmm i see your point but limiting already mastered material seems questionable to me tbh. maybe not with badly done stuff per se, but thats a different story really - and i expect the exception if we are dealing with fairly modern music.

i guess -3 would probably be a decent enough level to come in, obviously you wont be wanting distortion. this is why i said to normalize, as if you are peaking at less than 0 then you can turn it up without any clipping. i suppose i'm not factoring in vinyl imperfections here such as pops and crackles though, where you can get peaks that are not related to the music - i guess a limiter could be handy then. but i certainly wouldn't wanna limiter to be kicking in below where the actual music is peaking.

if its a bit quiet you do generally have a gain control on your mixer. use it.

oh yeah, deffo best needles/tables/pre/interface available on the way in.

The thing is, peak-limiting (and for that matter the loudness war) is an almost entirely digital phenomenon. On vinyl there's not really any need to keep peak levels below a certain absolute point because there's no concept of 0dBFS. The cutting->playback->preamp signal path can cause peaks not accounted for by the mastering process; after ripping these can be tamed without too much degradation of perceived sound quality. I'm not sure I'd recommend limiting everything by "a few dB", but I'd put a limiter on the end and boost the signal until it's barely scraping gain reduction. That way, if there's a section where (for example) the kick and hihat together are peaking above 0dB because of phasing effects, you don't lose the level you otherwise might through peak normalisation.

Peak normalisation is a bit pointless IMHO, because "loudest sample value over the entire track" is a fairly meaningless quantity.

[jam1]

I'm glad some heads backed me up

I don't really know what I'm doing, hence why I have people helping me do it.

The kit we're using:

Technics 1210 Mk2.
Stanton 890 cart and styli.
Pioneer DJM600 mixer.
Rane SL3 box and Serato record function.
Then limited in Cubase 5 I believe.

[jheybs]

so i've always thought of different ways of doing it in audacity. what ive been doing for years is record to -3db peak, trim off excess at beginning and end then normalise all to 0db. i don't really like faffing about with audacity cuz there's so much you can do with it.

but today i updated my audacity and thought i may as well see what else i can do. Noise removal?! this pen thing?? so now i'm thinking of getting rid of the odd loud pop that limits the normalisation by using the pen tool, and possibly using noise removal to get rid of the odd static in the background

but im wondering if the noise removal will take away parts of the actual recording? the draw tool works within thousandths of a second so you wouldnt notice any difference (apart from no pop)... so what do you guys do? i love the warm sound of vinyl but sometimes the noise can piss me off