Tips & Tricks

Bring Your Old Vinyl and Cassettes into the Twenty-First Century

"Dad, what are these cardboard squares with the plastic circles inside?" my son asked while we cleaned out the basement.

"Those are called records. That's how people listened to music before CDs."

Puzzled, he inquired, "But how do you play them? They won't fit into a CD player."

"See that thing over there? That's called a record player. It uses a needle to get the sounds off the records so you can hear it."

"Yeah, right. I'm telling mom that you're making up stories again..."

OK. Let's pull those LP's, 45's, casettes, and 8-tracks out of the basement and make them into digital files that can be burned onto CD or just played on your computer. Make sure you have all the necessary equipment mentioned above in Computer's 101. For my examples I will be using Magix Audio Cleaning Lab , though other programs out there use pretty much the same process.

Once your stereo is connected to the computer, bring up your audio recording software.

Click the "Record" button. If you are using good recording software, you'll see a window where you can set recording levels (mediocre software will just start recording).

Start your record or tape player and watch the meter to make sure you are getting a good recording level. Since songs tend to get louder in the middle, you may want to get your level from there.

Next you should give the file you're about to create a name. With the program I'm using, I just click the folder icon in the bottom right corner of the Record window.

Here we have a decision to make: whether to record each song as an individual file, or each side of the album/tape as one track. A feature in Audio Cleaning Lab that I like is the ability to record the whole album, then go back and put in markers for each track that allow me to export each as a separate Wave file. Not all recording software can do this, so you must do it manually.

With that out of the way, you can then start your music and click the Record button. Don't worry if there is some silence before the music starts, this can be edited out later.

When the song / songs you are recording end, just click the Stop button. You can also make one track of just your favorite songs by clicking stop, going to the next song, and then Record again. (You could even do this to put both sides of an album on one track, but keep in mind file size-the longer the recording, the larger the file). Once you're all done click Close .

You should see the wave for the music you just recorded. Depending on your software you have many options from here such as filters, noise reduction, effects, and equalization. You should read the Help files (just click F1 ) or the manual before proceeding ( Magix Audio Cleaning Lab has great video tutorials). Once your modifications are done, you'll want to Save or Export (again, depending on the software) the file as a WAV. There may be other options listed, but WAV files convert to CD with better quality.

You could even convert the files from WAV to mp3 later on ( MusicMatch Jukebox can do this quite well). From there you can create a playlist and record a mega mp3 disk of all your favorites from the vinyl age.

~ David

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