Is there enough interest to open a thread about making CD-Rs from LPs?
This article got me thinking about it, and if it gets going I might learn something. Here's my existing procedure:
- Dub an LP, one side at a time, to the computer using whatever hardware & software you use
- If the LP has big differences in volume between the tracks -- one soft acoustic track wedged in between some loud electric tracks for instance -- you'll want to preserve that volume difference.
- If all tracks are the same volume, you'll want to normalize each track separately.
- First step is to take the big side-long audio file and start cutting it into tracks. Find the end of the first track, copy the start of the file to there, and do a copy (Cntrl-C), create new file (Cntrl-N) and paste (Cntrl-V).
- Take your new first track file, find the beginning of the music, and take everything before that and silence the audio (zero the bits). Cut it to a comfortable half-second or so length.
- Go to the end of the file, find where the audio fades out, and silence everything after that. Cut it to a comfortable 2-second length or so. Use the "fade-out" tool to fade the final audio in a natural-sounding length as the original recording fades -- fast for a instant stop, slow for a mixing board fade.
- Now, look at your file for large clicks. Sharp peaks well above the normal audio should be zoomed in on, confirmed as clicks, and redrawn if confirmed. I do this by hand, because I've never found an automated process which does it cleanly. Play the audio file and stop and fix each click or pop. This can take a few minutes with a clean LP, or a few weeks for a dirty one.
- Some websites tell you to sample rumble and hiss from the space between tracks, and invert it to remove it from the rest of the recording. I've never found this works. It always leaves digital artifacts. I usually end up using sharply-defined EQ to address them as non-impactfully as possible.
- Once the file is cleaned up, normalize it to -1 dB.
- Save the track file to a new folder with the album name, and move to the next track.
- When all tracks are cleaned and normalized, burn to a CD-R and preview with headphones. Listen for any frequency response or equalization anomalies you couldn't hear on the computer (it helps to have decent audio on the computer).
- Some noise artifacts are nearly-impossible to remove. Take the "scritch" for instance, which is a multi-millisecond burst of spiky waves caused by damaged grooves. No automated process will touch a scritch, and it can take months to redraw the waveform. In extreme cases I have resorted to cutting and pasting a section of audio from somewhere else in the file that matches the damaged audio. If a scritch is short enough however sometimes you can get away with just putting a brickwall filter on it.
- Every LP project presents unique challenges, and creativity helps you solve those challenges. Would love to hear some other people's experiences.
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