How I rip vinyl LPs to CD

I know I have mentioned before in passing that I’m gradually ripping our vinyl collection (about 700 LPs overall) to CD so we can listen to them on the computer, or in the car, or anyplace else that you can’t take a component stereo system. Over time, people I’ve told about this have asked me what hardware and software I use, and what my procedure is, so they could try it for themselves.  L has been particularly insistent about it for friends of hers whom she’s told about what I’m doing. Until now I’ve never documented the process, mostly because I’m lazy and writing down the procedure was too much like work.

However, last Saturday I ended up taking M to an art show (“art show,” hell; it was nothing but a church revival in disguise) where her school art club was exhibiting.  And while I was there, and to distract me from the barrage of praise music and evangelizing—complete with altar call—I started writing down how I do the ripping process.  And here it is.

What do I need?

• Turntable with RCA outs. I suppose you can use a USB turntable, but I never got rid of all my stereo components from the Eighties so that’s what I use.
• Cassette deck with RCA outs, if you want to dub from cassette.
• Stereo amp.
• Sterero patch cable – male to male RCA connectors. Mine is 25 feet long, because I have to reach from one room into another. You may be able to do with shorter.
• Stereo Y-jack – RCA female to 1/8” stereo mini.
• Desktop computer with line-in audio port. A discrete sound card is nice, but I’ve had perfectly acceptable results using the onboard sound. I have not, though, had any kind of good results using a laptop to do the recording. Laptop sound cards are generally crap, just as laptop speakers are. This is one time when a having a desktop machine is important.
• Audio editing program for carving up the file into CD-able tracks – the one I like best is a British program called Wave Repair. It’s purpose-designed to do exactly this.

How do I hook it up?

1. Connect the turntable to the phono ports on the amp.
2. Connect the cassette deck to the aux-in ports on the amp, if you’re doing cassettes.
3. Connect one end of the RCA patch cable to the aux-out ports on the amp.
4. Connect the other end of the patch cable to the Y-jack.
5. Plug the Y-jack in to the line-in port on the computer sound card.

What do I do?

• Launch the audio editor and set it to save recordings as .WAV files. The file format is important; .WAV is the only format a CD burning program like Roxio Creator can use to make a playable audio CD. Set the input to use line-in or stereo mix for input, depending on what your computer wants.
• It’s best to record each album into its own sub-directory, beccause all the files must be named the same thing. Why this is so will become clear in a minute.
• Figure out roughly now long the whole recording will play. Remember that an audio CD can only hold 80 minutes of music, so if your recording time is going to run over 75 minutes, then record it in two halves and make a 2-CD set out of it.
• Start the editor recording before you drop the needle on the turntable. Set it to save the file name as track.wav. This is IMPORTANT. Audio CDs use the naming convention of track01, track02, etc., and when you start splitting tracks you’ll need to follow that convention (track01.wav, track02.wav … tracknn.wav)
• Play the album through. Don’t worry about dead air while you’re turning the record over—you’ll edit it out later.
• Once the album is completely recorded, stop the editor and save the file.
• Start editing by getting rid of most of the dead air at the beginning and end of the file. Leave a couple of seconds of silence, especially at the beginning of the file as lead-in. Edit out the dead air where you turned the record over. Again, leave yourself a second or two of silence so you have somewhere you can split tracks.
• Save the file after this, if it doesn’t do so automatically.
• If you want to, at this point you can edit to clean up clicks, pops, and surface noise. Personally, I find that’s too much work for the result achieved and leave all but the worst of them alone. I just accept “hey, albums are like that” and go on. If the editor offers the feature (and most do), you can let it auto-correct clicks and pops. I don’t recommend this, though. I’ve found it makes the track sound like a bad MP3.
• Start marking the spots where you want to split off the individual tracks. The index mark should go into the middle of the silence between the tracks. This spot is usually obvious with studio albums, because the trace will get near flatline in the inter-track space. (You’ll never see a real flat line with LPs, because of turntable rumble.) Live albums are trickier, because applause often masks the inter-track. You’ll have to use your judgement to choose a space to break the tracks. Sometimes you just pick an arbitrary spot.
• Once you have the track breakpoints marked, have the audio editor split the source file into tracks. Again, when you get through you want to have files named track01.wav, track02.wav and so on for however many tracks there are.
• Once you’ve created the split tracks and are satisfied with the quality, delete or move the source file. You don’t want to record it onto the CD by mistake.
• Launch your favorite CD burning program. I do not recommend trying to use Windows native burning capacity; I’ve never had a good result from it. I use Roxio Creator or Sonic Record Now, but any third-party burning application will do as well. Create an audio CD, not a data CD. Data CDs can’t be read by CD players. For media, use CD-R only. CD players can’t read CD-RW or DVD anything. Add the tracknn.wav files to the project to be burned. Again, be aware of how much time you’re trying to add to a CD. Anything over 80 minutes won’t fit. Better to have two 40-minute CDs and get a good burn than an iffy 80 minutes, or a truncated 90 minutes.
• When the burn is complete, take a look at the finished CD in Windows Explorer. You should see a bunch of 1K-long files named track01.cda, track02.cda, and so on. This is as it ought to be. Windows Explorer has no clue how to read encoded audio, so all it can understand is the .CDA files that act as pointers to the actual audio.