Audacity software.

[jawoodruff]

Audacity is a great program for recording onto and mixing. I've used it in relation with Fruity Loops and on its own. Very good program.

[Dorsetmike]

I found a freebie that seems to cope well with copying LPs to .WAV, if you register and upgrade for a fee it will generate most Audio file formats. Called Free Audio Editor.

Once having the file on the PC you can then use Audacity or whatever app you prefer r to convert to MP3 if needed. Note that for Audacity to generate WAV or MP3 you have to select Export, not Save.

Cheers MIKE

[dpurq]

That's the way I do it and for transferring music to CDs from old 73's.
The editing feature is useful - though there may be handier methods I don't know about.
For example we have a two hour concert of choral music here in Canada every Sunday. I save the whole two hours, convert it later to MP3 and edit that with Audacity to select out what I want to keep.
It took me a little practice to get the hang of it - but isn't that the way with everything?
dpurq

[Dorsetmike]

I've found one "fiddle" you can do with Audacity if you have a bad click on a Vinyl recording, use the magnify tool until you have the waveform of the crack well stretched out, then highlight that part of the waveform which exceeds the amplitude of the surounding waveforms then hit delete you probably lose about 1 or 2 milliseconds from your recording, but I can't detect any break. I'll see if i can manage a screen shot tomorrow to show better what I mean.

[greatcyber]

Hi Mike,

When I put all my LPs onto my hard drive using audacity, certain ones needed to be "tweaked" to remove the clicks if there happened to be a scratch on the record. As you said, all things take patience. And there all always other ways to accomplish this, depending on how involved you want to make it. Creative (Sound Blaster) also does these same things now, but since audacity is free, it's very popular and works well anyway.

My creative audigy has taken a turn for the worse. My laptop doesn't really have a sound card, rather an "emulator" STAC9200 chip. This is sigmatel corp's driver that came with my Dell XPS. But lately my advanced functions don't work (thanks to an update from Microsoft). After dealing with Dell for 3 days and working on my own for 4 days, still have no speaker selection or surround sound anymore. And as Dell's support has finally driven me over the brink, I'm off to the computer store to buy an external audio card today and not have to spend any more time with this issue. I suppose the new card will also offer the same software to do the things that audacity does. I'm getting Creative Labs X-Fi. Will let you know how it works. It costs $75.

[Dorsetmike]

Some prominent clicks on an Audacity trace of an old Vinyl




Use the magnify tool to expand the portion to show just one click


Higlight it with the select tool, note the time above the trace, the highlighted part is much less than 0.01 of a second,
and as such, to all intents and purposes, removing it has no noticeable effect to the ear.



Press the delete Key on your keyboard and the highlighted aerea goes



Repeat for all the bad clicks, play through and listen for any others and note the track time(s) and treat as above.

[Charlie90]

Start your own music editing and recording in your pc, applying effects as desired, and mixing down the tracks into the final result by using FlexiMusic Audio Editor. This will help you.

[Alistair]

Yeah ive used Audacity aswell, we first learnt about it in about maybe year 7/8, its really good for editing allthough when i tried recording instruments onto another layer it was a bit delayed

[Soubasse]

For freeware, Audacity is really a very good program considering what it can do in terms of effects, processing and even multitracking (but the latter will depend on your processor).

Good post by Mike up there earlier in regard to editing pops and clicks out of old vinyl recordings, although I would also suggest out that it's often a good idea to make your cuts so that the waves join back together at a zero crossing (ie, the point where the wave crosses the centre line) as this can also avoid unwanted clicks.

And whilst it is possible to record via the audio input of your soundcard, always check the file afterwards for DC offset. It's easy to spot when the audio wave is not properly centered along the 0 line (literally "offset"). Some older or cheaper soundcards will cause this and it produces an often annoying hum on playback. Thankfully, it can be easily corrected in Audacity using the Normalise function which has the option to correct DC offset to 0.

The phase inversion in Audacity is very useful (among other things) for removing vocals from songs (for your own karaoke tracks if you're really into that sort of thing!)

Matt