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.
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Friday, September 22, 2023 - 08:54:22
How has the conversion process been going? If nothing else, I’m sure it’s giving you a chance to listen to some of the music you may not have heard for a while. I never heard of Freac, but probably not surprising, being a Linux user and all. Does it have the ability to filter out the recordings, taking out the pops and crackles you typically get playing LPs? I know it’s a lot of extra work, but sometimes on the odd LP I like to run the MP3 through Audacity to clean it up a bit.
It’s funny how, as our technology advances over the years, it becomes more difficult to deal with the older tech. You would expect that the new stuff would find it easy to handle the older forms of data… but it’s actually the exact opposite! I guess, just as NASA says they’ve lost the technology that got them to the moon 50 years ago, playing records and cassettes is a lost art, too. ;) .
Friday, September 22, 2023 - 09:14:09
The conversion project has been put on hold for a while as other issues have come up that needed tending to but I intend to get back to it in short order. The program actually has a Linux version but it doesn’t have some of the features that Audacity has. It is basically an audio converter and ripper. I use it mainly to convert the music that is loaded onto my computer after converting a song. The music comes out in WAV format which, as you know will take up a lot more space so I use it to convert them to mp3. You might want to take a look at their home page for additional information.