vinyl digitisation

[xero]

can anyone recommend the most painless way of recording from vinyl to hard disk on macs? In particular a way of splitting albums into individual tracks without too much fiddling around manually chopping and saving bits would be good, as would the option to create mp3s as well as aiffs - any ideas people?

oh and in case anyone's got ethical concerns, it's not for file-sharing, just for convenient access and digital mixing

 

[nomos]

Toast 6 (Titanium) comes with a proggy called CD Spin Doctor which lets you record a whole vinyl side at once then drop in track markers wherever you like. Then it exports it to Toast for burning. I'm not sure, but you might be able to get toast to make a disk image on your HD (rather than going through with burning) which you might be able to import into iTunes. I've been meaning to try this. Maybe I will now.

 

[Woebot]

theres a macintosh USB widget called an iMic made by Griffin Technology which enables you to record in better quality than the mac's own sound port.

ive never used spindoctor, but its a pretty handy bit of software.

next step up, but still not TOO expensive: i use a box called an M-Audio Firewire Audiophile with Peak to do my recorsing nowadays, though hacking tracks out is a bit of a hastle.

dont rule out shelling out 150 quid or so for a stand-alone SONY CD-recorder. they f***ing handy! all you have to do is press a button between tracks!!!

 

[xero]

next step up, but still not TOO expensive: i use a box called an M-Audio Firewire Audiophile with Peak to do my recorsing nowadays, though hacking tracks out is a bit of a hastle.

got the fw audiophile as well so the hardware side taken care of, just that hacking tracks out bit I'm trying to improve!

Toast 6 (Titanium) comes with a proggy called CD Spin Doctor which lets you record a whole vinyl side at once then drop in track markers wherever you like. Then it exports it to Toast for burning. I'm not sure, but you might be able to get toast to make a disk image on your HD (rather than going through with burning) which you might be able to import into iTunes. I've been meaning to try this. Maybe I will now.

this sounds like a handy process if the disk image part works - I'm going to give it a go

 

[blissblogger]

huh?

all you have to do is press a button between tracks!!!

that's the pain in the arse bit innit

 

[grimly fiendish]

sound studio is the king:

http://www.felttip.com/products/soundstudio/

no matter what inputs you're using (both my macs have line in, but an iMic will work fine too), it'll do a smashing job. plug in, hit record, watch as it creates a big shiny wave file ... then simply position your cursor between tracks, click "insert break", and save it out as neat little individual AIFFs. which you then import into iTunes and convert to the format of your choice.

you've got some pretty good effects (fading, for instance), plus the ability to edit the waveform if you want to get rid of a particularly stubborn crackle. for $50, it rocks.

 

[nomos]

it worked

Ok, here's the deal...

1. Open CD Spin Doctor and record your record. it does a good job of guessing where tracks start and finish. save it.
2. From the 'Toast' menu choose 'Send all tracks to Toast.' Toast will open with your album in it.
3. In Toast, go 'File' > 'Save as Disc Image'
4. In Toast, go 'Utilities' > 'Mount Disc Image'
5. Your album will mount and iTunes will start to query the whatitsname database. From there you just import as usual.

Stuido King looks nice too.

 

[Grievous Angel]

1. Open CD Spin Doctor and record your record. it does a good job of guessing where tracks start and finish. save it.

Can you mannually edit it? Say you do a CD-length mix and you want to cut that up and it's not obvious where tracks start at end, can you insert manually?

I ask cos I've exported a new mix from Cubase and I want to cut the file into tracks, but I can't think of a way to do it in Cubase without having to re-export it / re-render the audio... I just want to split the file. The way studio King works sounds ideal. If I didn't misunderstand it.

Matt, you technophile, that's a really nice audio interface you've got! You recording your Grime in 24-bit?

 

[xero]

I ask cos I've exported a new mix from Cubase and I want to cut the file into tracks, but I can't think of a way to do it in Cubase without having to re-export it / re-render the audio... I just want to split the file. The way studio King works sounds ideal. If I didn't misunderstand it.

Spark does this well as does sound studio I think which is shareware if I remember rightly

 

[xero]

thanks for the tip autonomic, my toast doesn't have cd spin doctor cos it's, ahem, not fully kosher but I'll have to try and get hold of it cos that sounds like a good method

 

[nomos]

No problem

Can you mannually edit it?

Yup. It's got this nice little scrolly window with your waveform in it. The songs are all marked with different colours and you can drag their dividers back and forth to split it up any way you like. You can make new divisions too and I believe you can also turn off that feature for things like mix tape rips where it wouldn't work anyway.

 

[puretokyo]

Has anyone tried the Traktor / Final Scratch system for recording vinyl?

 

[stelfox]

the easiest way i've found is to plug your mac into your amp via the mic-in/phones-out ports and then use a little program called amadeus to record. it's super cheap to license (about $15) and works just fine for me.