[red rocket]

Here’s the way I do it at the moment:

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I’m playing the record on a Pro‑Ject 1 turntable


with an Audio Technica AT95E cartridge,


amplifying the signal with an Acoustic Research A‑03 integrated amplifier


and passing it through a Sony MDS‑JE500 MiniDisc deck


which is a bit closer to my computer.

The audio gets recorded from the MD player’s headphone jack via a ¼" to ⅛" headphone plug adapter


with a stereo mini to RCA adapter


plugged into it, followed by a five metre RCA cable


and another one of these


at the other end plugged into the line in/external mic jack on my G3 iMac.


I’d record the audio stream to the hard drive with Sound Studio 3,


possibly clean it up with the Audio Unit plug‑in version of BIAS SoundSoap 2,


set track markers and export the segments as 16 bit .aif files, before converting them to 192kbps .mp4 with QuickTime Pro (to get it to use the ‘Best’ encoding setting, iTunes only uses ‘Better’ or ‘Good’ supposedly, can’t remember which).


So far, I’m satisfied with the results. Doesn’t even take that much longer than ripping a CD with iTunes.

That said, I haven’t quite made my mind up whether I’ll continue to clean the audio up, or just leave it the way it is. The one record I’ve used SoundSoap on turned out quite well, which surprised me somewhat, I expected automatic restoration to be rubbish.

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How do you do it?

[red rocket]

Should probably be a Lounge thread, feel free to move it, mods.

[destron]

If it works well for you I don't see any reason to change. I recorded about 100 of my records to my computer in one go once before moving across oceans:

record player -> phone preamp -> amp -> rca cable -> audio interface

I recorded it into a single wav file then used software to create audio markers and save as FLAC files.

A couple of comments:

1. Seems like a lot of steps. Why does your signal go through the minidisc player? Why do you convert your 1/8" stereo plug to rca back to 1/8" stereo plug? Why not just use a 1/8" stereo cable?

2. I would save any records I recorded as FLAC (at least to an external hard disk or DVD) because it is too much work to want to do it again. You can then convert the FLAC to your portable format of choice. However, if you ever want to change your portable format you can.

[analogika]

1. Seems like most of the steps in that set-up are happening because he had stuff lying around the house ("minidisk player is closer to the computer" sounds like it happened to fit the available cables).