Heres one for fellow hi-fi nuts! I have for months now, on and off, been digitising my collection of over 100 vinyl LPs to play over my Logitech Squeezebox streamer. I still love vinyl as arguably being still the purest hi-fi sound when played on good equipment and, of course, the beautiful artwork of many of the album covers make CD covers and downloaded files look positively sick. But the process of extracting a vinyl LP from its jacket, setting up and starting up the turntable, then carefully lowering the arm and cartridge onto the outside edge so that it doesnt jump, etc, does take time and there are occasions when its much easier and more convenient just to run digital files via the streamer and a DAC and forget about it, hence my desire to digitise my entire vinyl collection. However, after spending several hours yesterday digitising just a few albums, I got to doing some maths and wondering whether it was all worth it! The process of digitising a vinyl album into MPEG4 files the way I do it involves a number of stages..... 1) Play the album in real time on my Michell GyrodecSE turntable and record it to a Yahama CDR-HD 1500 hard disc/CD recorder, inserting the track numbers by hand with the remote, otherwise half a dozen tracks on a side come out as just one continuous track. 2) Record the tracks onto a CD-RW disc on the Yahama machine and finalize it. I use re-writeable CDs, so I can use the same one over and over again, otherwise Id end up with umpteen useless discs. 3) Import the disc into iTunes on my PC. Since the iTunes database cant usually identify the album title, artiste or tracks, this means editing and writing in the info by hand with the keyboard. 4) Transfer the digitised album, along with the downloaded artwork cover from Wikipedia images, from the iTunes folder into the appropriate music directory. I keep several directories on an external hard disc, each dedicated to different genres, like jazz, classical, blues, folk, etc. 5) Set the Logitech Squeezebox software to read the music folders and send the information to the streamer, which is with my hi-fi system in another room. 6) Finally, erase the data on the CD-RW ready to re-use. Yesterday I worked out that each vinyl album of approx 40 minutes playing time was taking me about 1 hour and 20 minutes to go through the whole digitisation process, i.e. three albums took four hours. I got to thinking there must be an easier way! And before anyone suggests replicating my entire vinyl collection with CDs and/or downloads, I would point out that that is going to cost me well over a thousand quid. No doubt some of you wont have a clue what Im talking about, but fellow hi-fi and music geeks will understand!!! Perhaps I should get out more?
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 10:51:06 +0000
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