Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Posted by xjustinx |
I was performing some maintenance adjustments on my turntables the other day, such as: a thorough cleaning, tonearm tracking force, cartridge alignment, vertical tracking angle, and anti-skating force. Over the last year or two, various people have asked me what equipment I use when converting from vinyl/cassette to mp3, so I decided to just make a post about it.
At the analog end, I have a mid 90s Sony PS-LX300H turntable. I got it in high school, and given that it was produced in the 90s, it's fairly heavy duty, and I've also installed a diamond tipped needle upgrade along the way. For more every day use, I have a mid 70s Sansui SR-333 hooked up to my home stereo.For cassettes, I have a Pioneer CT-W770 dual deck.I run both of these components through a USB preamp. I know that a lot of people enjoy the convenience of those Ion USB turntables, but I've yet to become a fan, because I feel they severely lack quality as actual turntables. For the price you would pay for a USB turntable, you can get a phono USB preamp, and have your legit turntable running through it. I currently use an ARTcessories USB Phono Plus preamp.
On the actual computer end, I run Adobe Audition 3.0. It's a pretty powerful recording/editing program, and I'm usually pretty happy with the results I get out of it. However, it's not a free program, so if you aren't into the idea of paying for a program, or acquiring it via more nefarious means, I suggest using Audacity. It's a great freeware program that can handle a lot of the same things that Audition does.
Once I've run some click/pop/hiss eliminators, and placed the files through the mastering suite for extra volume, I'll typically output the wav files as 320kbps mp3s (I used to only do 256, but upgraded to 320 a while ago). If I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll burn the wav files to cd, and then rip the cd with Exact Audio Copy to a v0 variable rate with the LAME plugin. I've also tried placing the LAME .exe file directly into the Audition root directory, but for some reason, things just weren't working correctly.

Anyways, hopefully that answers most of the questions that people have had as to exactly how I go about doing conversions that I post to this blog.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I posted before about not ripping the wav files to CD before encoding them into mp3. I didn't know that you were using Audition before.

Supposedly, if you put the .flt file from the coolLAME filter and the .dll from the LAME library in the root of the Audition folder, it should enable saving files as mp3 with a bunch of preset options.

I hope this works for you.

xjustinx said...

Yeah, see I did exactly that, but I was unable to achieve the v0 variable bit rate that I love. No matter how many times I would select "insane" preset, the result would be 160kb.

Alternate 1995 said...

Awww, come on guys, it's so simple. Maybe you need a refresher course. It's all ball bearings nowadays! Now you prepare that Fetzer valve with some 3-in-1 oil and some gauze pads. And I'm gonna need 'bout ten quarts of anti-freeze, preferably Prestone. No, no make that Quaker State.

TakeADirtNap said...

save as wav then encode to mp3 with E.A.C., Razorlame, any app will do.. my suggestion is.. LAME 3.98.2, v0 0r 320KBit/s there's no need to burn to cdr unless you're lookin to get that .LOG file but that's void when it's a vinyl or cassette rip. great post tho i mean it aways suprises me to find out there's still people out there who have no idea how to rip a cd let alone a recore or tape.