Ripping vinyl to a PC or CD can be done in many different ways. The easiest is to buy an all-in-one unit that plays the record and gives you the option to burn it to CD. Another easy choice is to buy a turntable that has a USB output for plugging directly into your computer. While these are easy to use, they could suffer in quality if you have a better turntable in your system than the turntables included in the options above.

Since I have my own turntable, I wanted a way to convert my vinyl albums to digital without much money and with good sound quality.

First, I needed a soundcard with a “line in”. Most PC cards have this included, but I wanted better quality, so I used the M-Audio Transit USB soundcard option. The card has a digital output and a line in. With most soundcards, you will need an RCA to mini-plug adapter, but they only cost a couple of bucks. You simply run the RCA cables from your phono-preamp or receiver’s outputs to the mini-plug adapter and then connect that to your line in on your soundcard.

Next you need a program that will let you record from your line in to your computer’s hard drive. There are many programs that will help this process, but I am only going discuss the software that I have used:

1. Audacity – This is a free program that lets you chose which line in/soundcard you want to use to record and which card you want to playback from. I have two cards on my computer, so I chose M-audio to record and Sigmatel (the card included with the computer) to playback. Next, Audacity gives you a few options for recording. Redbook (typical) CDs are 44.1khz at 16-bits. You can default to this specification or use an even higher setting like 96khz at 32-bits. For simplification, I went with the typical CD specification.

Once you have your preferences setup, you are now ready to record. You simply start playing your record and press the red record button on the Audacity interface. Once the first side of the album is finished, you push stop on the Audacity interface and you can now edit the file using the program’s interface or just save it to a wav file.

2. Wave Repair – Since this program was created for editing digital recordings from vinyl, I decided to give it a try instead of using the Audacity editor. I am using the thirty-day trial, so I am not sure what features are lost after the initial trial period.

The program is very easy to use and gives you choices for how much you want to edit the album. For example, there is a “Declick” button in the toolbar that gives you choices for removing things like “medium clicks”, “large clicks”, “minor ticks”, etc. It also lets you apply noise reduction and other processes. You just have to decide just how much data you want gone, if any. There is a trade-off for too much editing. With each edit, you are getting farther away from the original recording. For that reason, you may want to save the edited version with a different name and compare it to the original before deleting the unedited file.

There is also a process called “normalization” that you can apply. This procedure is great for limiting the harshness of clipping (if there is any) and for making sure that all of your recordings play at the same volume.

3. CD Wave Editor - Now that you have a cleaned up version of your recording. You will probably want to split the tracks. In other words, so far you have one huge wav file of your album and need to separate it into several tracks. This program actually has an “Auto split” function that will find the silence between each song and split the file at that point. The program will also allow you to add in your own splits, if necessary.

When I tried this process, it worked great. However, I did have two files that were not on the album. These were just the silent passages that I recorded before the album started and after the album ended. You just uncheck the boxes next to those choices and the program will not save them.

Now you have several tracks with general names and without album, artist, and song title information (tags). Of course, you can manually add this information, but you may find it easier to use a program that can edit all of the tags in a batch format. You have a few choices for getting this information and it depends on what format you want to use to keep the file on your computer. If you want to keep the file in wav format you may want to try Tag& Rename:

4. Tag&Rename – This program will allow you to go to a couple of different sites like Freedb and Amazon to find album info. It is very accurate and will also retrieve album art at the same time. My problem with this program is the fact that you have to pay $29 to continue using it after the trial process.

Since most people like to compress their music files, you may want to do this before tagging the tracks.

5. dBpoweramp – This program is the one I like to use for converting my wav files to FLAC. FLAC is an open source program that compresses wav files without losing any data (lossless), but with a savings of space on your hard drive. I usually save to this format and dBpoweramp will do that for you. It will also transcode wav to mp3, AAC, Apple Lossless, etc. with different plug-ins. This is not the only program that will do transcoding. In fact, there are actually a lot of programs that transcode from one format to another, so use a different program if you already have a favorite.

6. MP3 Tag – Once you have your wav file converted to FLAC, mp3, AAC, etc. You can now use this free software to tag it. Simply open the directory that the files reside in and highlight the files you want tagged. You will then be able to use Amazon or Freedb via the program’s interface to find information on the file. It works just like the pay program Tag&Rename, but it will not work on wav files.

After you have saved the new file names and tag information, you should probably move the files with their cover art to their own folder. Now you are ready for side 2 of the album or album 2 if you did both sides in the initial run.

The process of converting vinyl to digital is a lot easier than it sounds. Once you have the wav file, you can edit it at any time. However, I wanted to put together a resource for going from vinyl to PC that would get you to the point of moving the album to a portable player or CD. This article should help you do that. Good luck!

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