Ahh the glorious thought of putting all that vinyl into digital format. Haven't we all been there at one time? No? Well I have.

I inherited a whole bunch of old Victorola records from the 1920's and 1930's and a even a few from the teens. I thought it would be a grand idea to rip them all to mp3 to preserve them digitally forever. The problem is...that's a really tedious thing to do. And it's worse with a modern album.

Tedious Process

The reason? Well, when you rip a cd to your computer, it's all nicely split up into tracks, named, categorized etc. With a vinyl album you record the whole side at once. Then you have to get some music editing software, cut the long side up into songs, save them separately, name them...nothing hard mind you, but just tedious.

So if you have grand plans of recording your entire vinyl collection to digital, well nice to know ya, cause you have a significant task in front of you. I just ripped the three or four albums I HAD to have and will now only do it once in a blue moon.

I don't care Greg, I want to do it anyways.

Well ok then, here's what I used to accomplish the task:

Audacity: It's a cool sound track editor that accomplishes everything you need to do and more. You can export to WAV format or MP3 or Ogg. Simple cut and paste capabilities for editing the track. It's easy.

Besides that all you need is a nice turntable, mine can play 78's but then I had the requirement to rip the old victorola records.

You can run everything through a standard receiver with phono inputs (do they still make those?). You don't need anything special on your computer really. I just use the standard line-in/line-out jacks for sound. I lay out how to wire it together below.

Steps for recording:

1. Place record on turntable
2. Start Audacity
3. Begin recording with Audacity (don't worry it's trivial to cut out all the lead-in white noise)
4. Play the record (you know, put that needle thingy on the record)
5. Make sure the sound levels are correct in Audacity. - if not set it correctly and go back to step 2.
6. Let album play until end of side - repeat for other side if necessary.
7. Using Audacity
   1. Save the entire Audacity project first.
   2. Determine each seperate song
   3. Cut down to single song by highlighting the rest of the recording and cutting.
   4. Save seperate song as newly titled audacity project [optional but recomended]
   5. Export to format of your choice: MP3, OGG, WAV.
8. Rinse and Repeat with next record

Done and Done.

Semantic Web

As an aside this brings up the whole issue of the semantic web. For as you notice in this process the easy part is getting the song ripped, the hard part is the tedious entry of the metadata.

This is the case for any type of content. The transfer of bits from the cd to computer or picture to computer or album to cumputer is relatively trivial. The hard part is getting the human to add in the description, the title, the tags etc.

We become the inputs to the machine. When it becomes aware are we just analogues for nerve endings?...