Tips & Tricks

Convert Your Records & Cassettes to CD - Part 2

In yesterday’s newsletter, I detailed how to transfer your old vinyl records and cassette tapes into a large .WAV file on your computer. In this final part, I will discuss four processes that will enhance your CD (noise reduction, sweetening, normalization, and editing).

And again, I use Sonic Foundry’s Sound Forge 6.0 for this entire process. If you would like a lower priced option, I would recommend CoolEdit 2000 from Syntrillium Software. But no matter what software you use, the following principles apply.

Noise Reduction: Cassettes and vinyl records were inherently noisier than CD’s. Cassettes have problems with background hiss while records are plagued with clicks and pops. The better shape your original source is in, the less time you will have to spend on noise reduction. It is difficult to explain how to do this, because every recording is different and will need different amounts of processing to make it sound right. There is a lot of listening and trial and error involved with this. With a little patience and a keen ear, you should be able to get rid of most of the offending noise from your recording. Don’t overdo it though. It’s better to leave a little noise in place than to end up with something that sounds sterile and lifeless.

To remove excess hiss from tape-based recordings, the best thing to do is not let the hiss get into your recording to begin with. Look at the original cassette and/or insert to see what type of noise reduction was used when the cassette was made (most prerecorded cassettes use Dolby B type noise reduction, and if it just says “Dolby” it is almost certainly Dolby B type). Select the same type of noise reduction on your tape deck. This will usually eliminate most of the hiss, but if there is still more than you want you can use the Noise Reduction Plug-in. This tool will allow you to take a Noiseprint of the hiss from a place on the tape where there is no music present (ex: the blank spaces between tracks) and tell the computer to erase everything that matches that noiseprint while leaving other sounds untouched. Used judiciously, this can be very helpful in cleaning up recordings with excess hiss.

Unless your original vinyl record is in pristine condition you will probably end up with some annoying clicks and pops that will mar your recording. Careful cleaning of your record before recording will help get rid of some of this surface noise, but some noise will still make it onto your recording. A Click and Pop Plug-in will work wonders with vinyl based recordings. As with the noise reduction tool, don’t overdo it. You should be able to get rid of most of the offending clicks and pops with a little experimentation. Try doing that with a standalone CD recorder!

Sweetening: Once you have removed the noise from your recording, give it a listen and see how it sounds compared to a well-recorded CD from your collection. You don’t want to make drastic changes here, but because of the limitations with your original source you may want to play around a little with the equalization settings. If your recording sounds muffled you may need to add a little treble, and if it sounds thin you can add a little bass. The Smooth/Enhance tool is also very useful for adding life to a dull recording or taming an overly bright one.

As with the processes above, you will need to listen to your recording as you are changing settings to see what sounds the best with that particular recording.

Normalization: Remember when you were setting the levels to make your recording? Chances are you ended up setting them a little lower than actually needed for fear of the meters going into the red. Now you can fix that. Using the Normalization tool, choose the setting that says maximize peak levels. This will raise the volume on your recording until it’s loudest peak is right at zero, giving you the maximum volume level available without distortion.

Editing: This is the final step before actually burning your CD. You now have a (hopefully) great sounding file that contains all of the songs from your recording. This needs to be broken down into individual files for each song. The easiest way to do this is to make a new folder on your desktop to house the individual songs. Now, starting at the beginning of your recording, highlight the first song and hit Ctrl+X to cut it out of the original file. Go to the File Menu and select New (or Ctrl+N) and a window will appear that will allow you to create a new sound file. Make sure it is set for “44,000Hz, 16 bit, Stereo” and click OK. You will now be able to hit Ctrl+V to paste the song here. At this point, you may want to use the Fade tool to fade out any leftover noise and the beginning and ending of the track (Select the Process Menu, then Fade, Out).

Next, go to the File Menu, Save As and save your track in the desktop folder you created earlier.

Burning the actual CD will vary depending on your CD burning software. Some general things to remember are to make sure that the tracks are in the correct order and that you haven’t inadvertently missed or duplicated any of the songs. Also, if your recorder supports it, select the Disc at Once burning mode. This will alleviate those annoying gaps between songs that fade together or have applause between them. When your CD is done, give it a listen before deleting the files from your hard drive, so you can make another CD easily if for some reason there are any errors.

And that's it! Please, don’t let the length of this article scare you away from making your own CD’s. It is really very easy (and fun!) to do.

--Bruce Neher

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