I recently bought a new turntable, which has a USB output in addition to the standard RCA jacks. I’ve been using it to convert my modest vinyl collection to AAC, and have bought new albums on vinyl instead of on CD whenever I can.
This is remarkably painless, and I’m even doing this only using free software. Audacity works nicely for editing tracks when it’s easiest to look at the waveform; gramofile works on OS X, and for some records, it does an admirable job of splitting tracks (though, on many it’s completely hopeless). The results are, mostly, rather good. You do get surface noise, and for some reason the turntable I bought starts getting really distorted, and it has to be powered down (unplugging the USB cable, too, of course). Some albums produce a lot of cracking, though, even on the first play out of the sleeve (I’m guessing this is static electricity, perhaps? Because vinyl records do build up quite the charge).
The other cool part is that a lot of labels will include either a full CD along with the album (Interpol’s Our Love to Admire does, and Squarepusher’s Hello Everything can be bought with both) or they include a coupon so you can download the entire album as MP3 (Interpol’s Antics and Neon Bible by The Arcade Fire — although the latter is 192Kbps MP3, not the 256Kbps my ears seem to like so much better, so I may go ahead and record it off vinyl anyway).
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Roman Kennke | 26-Jul-07 at 4:17 am | Permalink
All the USB turntables that I’ve seen have been rather cheap. This most likely means that the mechanics and pickup are also of the cheap types. In my experience these tend to create noise and damage the LPs. I wouldn’t play stuff on them too often. Luckily, I have a shop nearby that digital-izes LPs for little money. I hope that my favorite artists also offer digital music along with the LPs soon.
csm | 26-Jul-07 at 12:28 pm | Permalink
The one I got (an iTTUSB by whoever) seems rather well constructed. The stylus doesn’t seem cheap at all, and it produces an excellent tone through the standard RCA jacks, into my amplifier setup. I was slightly dumbfounded when I listened to the analog output for the first time, because it was so clean and crisp.
The USB output is a little noisy, and you do lose some tone when you digitize the signal. Also, the USB audio driver will sometimes go crazy and really distort the signal, and I have to reset it. Overall, it’s comparable to ripping a CD (though, the recordings from vinyl still don’t have as much brightness and chirpyness that I hear in CDs), with the occasional pop or click, of course.
It’s not a professional setup, but it works nicely and wasn’t expensive at all.