Tuesday, August 29, 2023
Vinyl Records Conversion
When I was stationed in Germany during my Air Force enlistment, I bought many Vinyl LP’s that were then available in the PX. Making that statement should give you a pretty good idea of the decade I am talking about so I have had some of these LP’s for over 50 years. Lately I’ve been thinking that I need to convert these albums to digital music so I set on the journey I am currently traveling to accomplish my goal. I keep thinking that I’m coming up on life span of an LP and don’t want the music to go away.
You would think that with today’s technology, this shouldn’t be a big project but when you don’t have the tools needed to accomplish the project, then it is a big deal. First of all, the turntable I have does not have any means to output any of the music…no rca output, no usb output, no nothing. So the first purchase I had to make was to get a turntable that would have one or both of those options. Got that out of the way when I bought a relatively “cheap” turntable that has both of those outputs and also has two small speakers. I am good to go.
The next thing I needed was a piece of software that would manage the music as it came from the new turntable to my laptop. As you might expect, there are quite a few pieces of software that will accomplish that feat, but for the most part they are not free or open source. I found an application that is free and does the job needed to move the music to my laptop. Unfortunately, it converts the music in a .wav format which plays the music just fine, but will take up a lot of hard disc space considering the number of albums I will be converting. Audacity is another piece of software that is free and does a good job converting music but it requires too many steps to accomplish the same thing, although it converts the music directly to mp3, which is the format I need/want.
After some research, I found another open source application that converts all types of format into whatever format is needed. That application is called Freac. So, now all I need is the time to convert the music. Luckily for me I am retired and have the time that I can spend finishing this project.