Copying music from records and cassettes to PC

[cmf21]

I am attempting to copy music from my old 33 rpm records (remember them) and cassette tapes. I have tried using Windows Sound Recorder with horrible results. Anyone willing to help me with this project?

 

[Bleep]

Sure I will try and help. First thing is get a good audio editing tool. There are several the one I like best because it is the easiest is Goldwave you can download it from there site and it is a full working version but will only let you do 8 or 10 edits until you register it. I think it is about $40.00.
If your turntable does not have a preamp built in you will have to get a stero one, I built mine but radio shack sells a pretty good one for not much money. The casset player will most likley have a tapeout jack you will have to use this jack. Do not plug into the mike jack of the sound card plug into the tape in jack. Unless all you have on the sound card is the mike jack which might be the only one available if the soundcard is built in. It takes some practice to get it right. If you want you can E-Mail me and maybe get into more detail.
e-mail-------HERE
Bleep

 

[boran]

well I'm doing the same as u for the moment (copying all my dad's records to CD)

I use the stereo output from the record player (a red and white plug) trough an overcross cable into my soundcard (this setup has the advantage that I can connect everything which has a seperate stereo output (and cous I also have a mini-jack splitter (making seperate channels out of it) I can connect almost anything to the card ...

anyway I think u already tought yer connection out so then u're down to the recording part, I use cool edit 2000 (a bit like goldwave but a tidbit better imho) (also more expensive tho but there are ways around that)

anyways after a record u should do a hiss and pop removal because that enhances the quality in a vaste amount (read both the goldwave or cool edit helpfiles for the way to do this)

 

[Bglad]

I'll say this by first saying I had horrible results trying to record to my computer and gave up. If you care at all about the quality, the computer is not the way to do this.

You should be able to plug a cassette directly into the computer line in. A turntable must go through an RIAA equalization preamp and gain boost. As said above, I think Radio Hack has a cheap one, probably good enough if you are recording to a computer anyway. You could also run it into the phono section of a preamp or receiver then run the tape out to the computer line in. You can't just run a turntable directly into the computer. Even if you can get enough gain, it won't be equlized correctly.

That said, I was never able to plug anything into my line in without getting distortion. Low level was too low and raising it just distorted. If you are picky about the quality at all, do yourself a favor and go buy the Pioneer music CD-R recorder. It is so dramatically better, much less hassle if you are doing a lot of recording and only about $250 these days.

 

[CyberCowboy]

If you have a broadband connection, it might be easier to use morpheus or something like that and download the mp3's. Saves ya time.
But if you don't then I don't see why you can't just use the sound card's line-in jack and use some good non-microsoft wave editor to record it.
I used sound forge, (which came with my soundblaster), to record my dad's old tapes to the hard drive. then did some editing, (like cutting and paste dead air). I got good audio files out of them. But before you record, you should adjust the incoming volume, since it might sound very bad if the volume is set too high or low.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[Workin']

<< If you care at all about the quality, the computer is not the way to do this. >>

I'll have to disagree with you. I've digitized hundreds of LPs and tapes using my PC. The finished product sounds at least as good as a commercially pressed CD.

The audio component CD recorders like the Pioneer bglad recommends are what you should use if you don't care about quality or know absolutely nothing about using a PC to record the sound and are unwilling or unable to learn about it. The stand-alone recorder gives you no way to edit your recordings, so any clicks, pops, or other defects will be in your final recording. There's something very disquieting about hearing clicks and pops while playing a CD.

The best approach is to connect your tape deck or turntable to a stereo receiver or preamplifier, and then connect the tape-out of that to the line-in on your PC's sound card. Even built-in AC97 sound can work fairly well, you don't need some fancy $200 sound card. The receiver or preamp will provide the correct level and equalization (for records) that you need.

I use Cool Edit Pro to record, but that is a $400 program. Cool Edit 2000 or whatever they are calling it now is pretty good and is better than GoldWave in my opinion. Get a demo version of Cool Edit here.

Set the recording level on your PC's line-in using the volume control you get when you double-click on the system tray icon. I usually have to set mine all the way up, yours might be different.

Then record to a new file using your editing software, and save it. I usually record one entire album side at a time, then splice the 2 files together before I do any post-recording processing. Typically, I normalize the new .wav file to 65%, then remove the clicks using Cool Edit's click and pop remover, then remove the background noise using Cool Edit's noise remover, then sometimes re-equalize the recording, depending on how it sounds. At each step I listen carefully to the results using headphones, and make adjustments as necessary. The final step is to normalize to 95%, give it a final listen, and then split tracks for burning to CD using Nero or Easy CD Creator.

It takes time and practice to get it right, no doubt about that. I usually spend at least 10 hours per LP fussing over it. And it ALWAYS sounds better than the crap downloaded off Morpheus.

So I guess it all depends how serious you are - you could leave off some of the processing if you aren't a perfectionist like me, and save a bunch of time there. If you have any questions you can PM me or post them.

 

[Zebo]

Hey workin'

I have a freind who will only listen to LP's and thinks CD's sounds awful. He has spent over 2K on a record player and insists LP's are superior. I do understand how digital music works when every sound +- of a certain freqency bin is grouped into that bin unlike analog which has no bins. So some info is indeed lost right? But can a human tell the difference or is this just another case of "I bought for a bunch so it's the best" theory.

 

[Workin']

Hey Carbonyl! Nothing inherently wrong with spending $2k on a turntable + cartridge (vs. spending it on wires!). Mine was over $700. However saying CD's sound awful and refusing to listen to them is absurd. Granted, some CD's do sound awful, but so do a lot of records! And no mater what, records still have all the limitations of a "physical contact" medium. Clicks, pops, wear, distortion from mistracking, etc. surely don't contribute to high fidelity. And a 65db dynamic range is pretty lame these days.

I'm not sure if I understand completely your "binning" analogy for digital audio, so I'll explain it in a way that makes sense to me, and you can see if that matches up with what you are thinking.

Any sound is made up of changes in air pressure, which can be represented as waves. Many simultaneous sounds make many simultaneous waves. But at any given instant, all those individual waves can be summed into one equivalent wave. If the measurement time can be made short enough, for all intents and purposes the wave can be represented as a point in time with a specific amplitude - and if we repeat the measurements quickly enough, we can get enough points to make a fair representation of the original wave. Each of the points is called a sample, and the rate at which each point is measured is called the sampling frequency. In additon, the amplitude has to represented as a number. Which follows that to uniquely describe a point on a wave we need 2 things - when it occurs and how big it is. So how do we know how many samples we need and how accurately must their amplitude be measured to correctly reproduce a wave?

There are a few handy coincidences that help out - the first is that some fancy math PROVES that any given sampling frequency can PERFECTLY reproduce (not approximately reproduce, not almost reproduce, PERFECTLY reproduce) a wave at 1/2 the sampling frequency. So how high of frequencies do we need to reproduce? Only a tiny fraction of people can hear sounds at 20,000Hz, so maybe that's a good place to cut off (there's one more factor that will come soon that helped pick that cut-off frequency, that's coming soon). Which means we need a sampling frequency of about 40,000Hz to make it work. If we pick 44,100Hz as the sampling frequency (to allow for minimal error correction), means we can record frequencies up to 20,000Hz.

How accurately must the amplitude be represented? Obviously converting an analog quantity to a digital value needs to have fine enough resolution to cover a wide range of values without being too "step-like", or the wave will not be perfectly reproduced. And we only have binary numbers to work with. So what power of 2 will give us enough steps so that it doesn't seem like we have steps? 2^8 only gives us 256 steps. That ain't gonna cut it. 2^16 gives us 65,536 possible values, that should do it. So we have 16 bits to work with to describe the amplitude. 16 bits is called the "word size".

OK, now we know we need 44,100 samples per second, and each sample must be 16 bits. That means 1 second of sound will occupy 705,600 bits. But we have 2 channels for stereo sound, so we need double the space. Make that 1,411,200 bits per second of stereo sound. That means 1 minute occupies 84,672,000 bits, or 10,584,000 bytes or about 10.09 Megabytes. But how much raw data can a standard CD hold? 750MB, that's how much. So we can fit about 74 minutes of music on a standard CD. So it's a nice coincidence that 44,100Hz and 16 bits works out.

So if there were any "bins", each would only be 1/44100 of a second wide and 1/65536 of the full-scale amplitude deep. If your friend can discern that he is a rare specimen indeed.

"But in "real" music there are transient frequencies far above 20kHz, CD audio just chops those off, so the music all sounds unnatural" is a common anti-CD statement. Precious few people can hear 17kHz, let alone 20kHz. If you can't hear it, how will you miss it? And if the transients indeed affect sound in the range you CAN hear, well, that's not lost because the recording is made after the sound is created, not before. So chopping off the part you can't hear would have no effect on the part you can. Besides that, after the first time you play a record, and every time after that, more and more of the high frequency content is erased. It's inevitable. A CD will sound the same every time you play it.

Some people also have grown so accustomed to the relatively high distortion (which often adds a "warmth" to the sound) that can't be avoided with vinyl playback (on the order of 0.1% THD for even the best cartridges) that to them CD's (with an order of magnitude less THD) sound "harsh".

There's also snob appeal - playing vinyl records "properly" involves a degree of ritual and expense that is missing from CD's. LP's must be handled lovingly, cleaned carefully, and high quality playback equipment is expensive. But any schlub can throw a CD in a $50 player and have technically superior sound.

Sorry for the little veer off-topic but actually you can probably get a better idea of what's involved if you know how it works.

 

[earthling]

You can download adware versions of there tool for what you want to do from the link below


Rosoft

 

[Zebo]

Indeed..... You know, there is a reason you are thought of as the resident audio expert here at anandtech.

After reading and re-reading your post several times I finally do understand the analog to digital conversion process much better. If you don't mind I would like to email this it to my buddy. Who ironically has a BS, MS, and PhD in civil engineering but for the reasons you described refuses to believe. And the "bins" are certainly more infinitesimal as applied to our hearing than I had previously thought.

EDIT:
Couple questions. When they do an analog to digital conversion do they include the transient frequencies above 20kHz in the summation equation of the one equivalent wave?
With digital at any givin' instant on say a three way speaker is only one of the three changing air pressure? While with analog signal can they all be playing simultaneously?

I could ask more but it's way past my bedtime and have highjacked this post enough.

 

[Workin']

<< Indeed..... You know, there is a reason you are thought of as the resident audio expert here at anandtech. >>

LOL, go over to the "magic wire" thread, they think I'm an idiot, although they so far have only proven my statements correct.

<< If you don't mind I would like to email this it to my buddy. Who ironically has a BS, MS, and PhD in civil engineering but for the reasons you described refuses to believe. >>

Ironic because one of my degrees is in civil engineering or because he has excess education and still can't figure it out. Maybe both. This isn't a CPSLO employee, is it? I don't mind if you send it to anyone.

<< And the "bins" are certainly more infinitesimal as applied to our hearing than I had previously thought. >>

They are small - designed to be well below audibility. The bins could more accurately be called "quanta" since the process of sampling and measuring the analog signal is called "quantization". On a small tangent it's intersting to note that at very low levels, a small amount of noise is added to the signal which makes the measurement more accurate. I'm a little fuzzy on the details but as I understand it, it has to do with the small number of significant digits involved with small amplitude. That added noise is called "dither".

<< When they do an analog to digital conversion do they include the transient frequencies above 20kHz in the summation equation of the one equivalent wave? >>

Short answer is yes, of course subject to the frequency response of the microphone. At the time of analog-to-digital conversion the signal is brick-wall cut off at 20kHz - but by that time I think we could accurately say that whatever sound was originally created already incorporates the effects of any transients in the audible range. Which leads to another point - I don't think even the very best microphones used for audio recording have useable (let alone flat) response past 25kHz.

<< With digital at any givin' instant on say a three way speaker is only one of the three changing air pressure? While with analog signal can they all be playing simultaneously? >>

The speakers ALWAYS get an analog signal. They don't know where it came from. The digital-to-analog converter used with the CD player reconstructs the original analog waveform which is then amplified and sent to the speakers. And the nature of mathematical limits (like in calculus) means that as the time slice gets shorter and shorter the waveform approaches a singular value, like you're thinking. However, the time slices in digital audio are sufficiently short and sequential enough that human hearing (and speakers) integrate those infinitesimal steps into a smooth whole. Besides that, speakers have so much slop due to their electro-mecahnical nature that "instantaneous" is not a word in their vocabulary.

Hehe, hopefully it's more clear now instead of less clear!

 

[Zebo]

YGPM

 

[Bglad]

Workin you are a typical inexperienced listener proclaiming what is better and backing your opinions with numbers and math. This is music we are talking about. You need to learn to use your ears rather than your engineering degree to base your opinions. I don't appreciate being told I don't know what I'm talking about in such a rude fashion. I have over 15 years as a professional re-recording mixer in los angeles and about $50k of stereo equip in my living room used for qc on final mixes as well as pleasure listening. I go through this argument with people all the time. If you can't hear a difference you either don't know how to listen critically or you don't have equipment capable of revealing the differences. All it takes is one short listen in my home to prove that cd's made on the computer don't compare to a dedicated audio cd recorder. Even neophyte listeners hear the difference immediately. It is only the engineers that sit and say this is not possible.

As for vinyl, if I had to give up either my cd player or my turntable, the cd player would get thrown out the window. Your theory is completely oversimplified. The CD sampling rate is still way too slow. Why do you think manufacturers are all fighting to come up with the standard for a faster sampling rate. On a sufficiently revealing playback system, NOT HEADPHONES unless maybe you are listening to the Stax or something like that, digital sounds grainy. You are hearing the sampling. It is also not completely encoding/deconding the complex harmonics that create audible textures, layering and soundstage depth and width. Admiting that you listen on headphones is admitting that you are not an educated critical listener. Headphones are not capable of revealing a soundstage when they are pasted to your head.

Your argument that noone hears above 17k is just bunk. There is a wealth of inormation above that frequency. I have done experiments with all analog recordings making copies with and without shelving the high end about 20k. Yes, what you think of as high frequency information like cymbals are still there, but the soundstage completely collapses. Digital would be good at recording pure frequencies but instruments in the real world produce notes with additional complementary frequencies recurring at mathematical multiples and these go way above 17k.

There is a reason almost every studio in LA has given up ther digital recorders and gone back to Revox analog 24 track. There are Mitsubishi and Sony 32 and 48 track recorders all over this city that you can pick up very cheap if you want one. Musicians and engineers who listen have given up on them. Yes most editing is then done digitally which degrades the master but the original analog is still available.

Although I can't argue with your theory, it is totally oversimplified and your conclusion couldn't be more wrong because of it. You are spreading terrible misinformation here. You need to choose whether you want to be an engineer or a music loving listener. There is a big difference.

 

[CarpetMan]

The old stereo I have does not have any out plugs except the speaker plugs. Can I use them to feed to my line in jack on the soundcard in order to record from the stereo? Or will this not give me a good enough quality sound to burn to cd? I hate to buy new equipment to record a few songs off of albums that you can no longer find. Thanks go out to anyone that can answer my simple question.

 

[Workin']

CarpetMan - you CAN connect the speaker outputs to the sound card, but there is danger involved - the speaker outputs are capable of much higher levels than the sound card can handle. If you do connect the speaker outputs to the sound card be SURE your volume control on the stereo is SET TO ZERO - then SLOWLY increase the volume of the stereo until the levels recorded on the PC are OK.

<< Workin you are a typical inexperienced listener proclaiming what is better and backing your opinions with numbers and math. This is music we are talking about. You need to learn to use your ears rather than your engineering degree to base your opinions. >>

Umm, without numbers and math none of this would be possible. BTW, I have been in the hi-fi scene since 1977, and even worked at a hi-end amp manufacturer doing testing and QC. If that's "inexperienced" then I guess I am. And my ears work just fine. But unlike you, so does my brain.

<< I don't appreciate being told I don't know what I'm talking about in such a rude fashion. >>

Umm, at no point was I rude. Unless just disagreeing with you is rude!

<< I go through this argument with people all the time. >>

So do I!

<< Your theory is completely oversimplified. >>

No it's not. There's just no "magic" involved. Except the "magic" of mathematics.

<< The CD sampling rate is still way too slow. Why do you think manufacturers are all fighting to come up with the standard for a faster sampling rate. >>

Because everyone already HAS a CD player, and to stay in business they need to convince the gullible to buy new stuff. Go to the library and read "The Emperor's New Clothes" for a classic take on your gullibility.

<< digital sounds grainy. You are hearing the sampling. >>

Riiiiigggghhhtttt..... you're nuts! So you are essentially saying you can hear 44.1kHZ?? Tell me another story!

<< It is also not completely encoding/deconding the complex harmonics that create audible textures, layering and soundstage depth and width. >>

if it's audible, it's encoded/decoded - at least as much as it is for vinyl.

<< admitting that you listen on headphones is admitting that you are not an educated critical listener. Headphones are not capable of revealing a soundstage when they are pasted to your head. >>

You're a little out of context here - You're right, $200 headphones probably sound WORSE than $50 "multimedia" speakers like most people have connected to their computers.

<< Your argument that noone hears above 17k is just bunk. >>

If you actually read what I wrote I said few people, and I stand by that statement. Have you ever had your hearing fully tested? I doubt it.

<< what you think of as high frequency information like cymbals are still there, but the soundstage completely collapses. Digital would be good at recording pure frequencies but instruments in the real world produce notes with additional complementary frequencies recurring at mathematical multiples and these go way above 17k. >>

Like I said, maybe 0.1% of people can hear 20kHz - and any lower harmonics would be recorded and encoded, and you couldn't hear higher ones anyway. So your point is moot.

<< Although I can't argue with your theory, it is totally oversimplified and your conclusion couldn't be more wrong because of it. >>

It's not wrong, it is somewhat simplified because the gritty details have no bearing on the conclusion.

<< You are spreading terrible misinformation here. >>

No offense, YOU are! Let's see, facts vs. fairies, reason vs. fantasy... you weren't over in the "magic wire" thread, were you? You're the epitome of a snobby audiophile who gets more enjoyment out of creating magic fantasies to make non-believers seem clueless, when in fact you could really use a clue.

<< You need to choose whether you want to be an engineer or a music loving listener. There is a big difference. >>

Thanks for making my day! That's the funniest thing I've read in a long time. So you are saying to be a music lover you have to be stupid? Last time I checked, music still was obeying all natural laws (except at your house)! Only the ignorant say you can't use brainy stuff like math to prove anything. Sorry, that's total nonsense.

 

[Bglad]

Your answer just strengthens my case. You are a an engineer not a music lover. Enjoy living with these opinions while I enjoy reproduction techniques that truly recreate the original performance event in my living room. Maybe someday you will meet someone that will enlighten you.

 

[Workin']

<< Maybe someday you will meet someone that will enlighten you. >>

Like a leprechaun? Well, I know I won't convince you of anything, and I know you won't convince me of anything. At least my position is backed up with facts instead of magical navel-gazing. And my feelings aren't hurt, I hope yours aren't, either.