Recording Vinyl Records Into Your Computer: Step by Step

hey everyone can you see Mark here again from sound matters covering all things vinyl as always today's topic is how to record your records onto your computer now you may ask why you would want to do this but there are several reasons of several very good reasons why you might want to record a record onto your computer and archive some of your records for listening digitally we'll get to that just after the intro but today after you've watched this video you are going to learn how to hook up your turntable to your computer correctly so that you can get a good quality signal coming in you're going to learn how to record into some software that better still won't cost you a penny you're going to also learn how to split the full recording of your record into individual tracks and then export it with all of the track information and artist information ready to go into your favorite digital music player so without further Ado let's get straight into the video thank you so in a world of Digital streaming why would you want to go to the trouble of archiving your record digitally or recording your record digitally to a computer it might sound strange but the fact of the matter is perhaps you don't want to sign up for a streaming service not everybody wants to pay per month for their music there's a lot of people that watch this channel that feel that way so that's a perfectly valid reason as to why you might want the convenience occasionally of digital files and being able to take your music on the move without having to pay for one of these Services secondly we're looking at things like the benefit of just how vinyl sounds now you might just prefer the aesthetic of how the record sounds compared to some of the digital releases there's that side of it too and also very often because vinyl is viewed as an audiophile medium you will find very often not always but it's often the case that sometimes the mastering engineer behind the vinyl release of the record will retain the Dynamics more in that mastering process you will find that very often funnily enough the vinyl record ends up with slightly better transients and more of the Dynamics of the record retained in place less brick wall mastering is what we're talking about here less compression at the mastering stage compared to some of the digital releases as I say this isn't always the case but there are plenty of examples out there of how the vinyl release of a record just sounds more kind of transient and Punchy and dynamic compared to its digital counterparts lastly of course even if you do Embrace Digital streaming there are plenty of examples of albums and releases that have just never made it onto these services so if you want the convenience of a digital version to take with you on the move or just a listen at your convenience at home you may want to consider recording the record version of it if you've got a copy onto your computer so that you can enjoy the convenience of it as a digital file if it's not available on a streaming service so how can you get your record into your computer how can you record it into your computer and make it into digital files for you to enjoy well I'm going to start off with how you shouldn't record a vinyl record into your computer you will see a lot of tutorials out there that will say that you can simply basically just go get yourself a cable like this that comes out of the output of your phono preamp and then this little mini jack here goes into the line input on the back of your computer in your sound card now although you can technically record a record into your computer this way the sound cards that are built into computers the stock sound cars within your laptop or your Tower based computer whatever you might have these are not the best quality sound cards they will not have the best analog to digital converters to do your record Justice you will find that you will get very flat quite dull representations of your record so number one is that I would say if you've been considering going down this route or you've this is how you've been doing it in the past I'm going to show you a better way in order to capture records more Faithfully in a way that does the medium justice so there are three main ways that you can look at that are a good viable option for archiving your records onto a computer number one and perhaps the easiest and simplest way to do this is to have yourself a USB turntable so you get a turntable that has a USB output these completely cut out the requirement of having to deal with things like you know a phone a separate phono preamp and potentially even a separate old USB audio interface to get into the computer it's simply Plug and Play Straight Out of the turntable and you're good to go the second way that you can do this and this is the example that we're going to find today because it offers the best balance in terms of convenience and affordability is that you can get yourself a phono preamp that has a USB output on it so you get a good quality phono preamp and it has that USB interface built into it so it's just a straight USB from that phono preamp so you essentially what you're doing is you're going turntable phono preamp and then the USB from the phono preamp into your computer the third way that I'm going to recommend is that you get yourself separate phono preamp and separate audio interface now this would be the best quality output so you're going from your turntable into your phono preamp and then out of your phono preamp into a purpose made USB audio interface now I have one of these as I say for the purpose of demonstration we're going to go the middle ground route in terms of just offering the best value for money and convenience but if you don't mind a little bit of extra money to spend and a little bit of extra time and effort in terms of the connectivity of how you get from the phono preamp to the separate audio interface you're going to get the best digit analog to digital converters the best digital representation the best digital capture of your records by going down this third route this is my audio interface here it's the ssl2 plus you'll need to make sure you have the input set to line if you go in this route and you also need a way of getting into an XLR input this may involve a cable like this which is a phono cable to XLR adapter and you can easily do that I happen to have a phono interface here that has XLR out on it which is unusual so for most commercial phono preamps which I'm guessing is most of you out there you will need those cables to go from your phono preamp into a professional interface like the SSL 2 plus so as it stands at the moment we have managed to get our turntable into our computer one way or the other whether it be the first second or third method that I've recommended to you so now what we need is some software to actually record the record into and the great news about this is that there is a very very good free package out there that you can download that will enable you to very easily capture records straight into your computer and then export these recordings as separate individual tracks just like you would have a set of MP3s or a set of high quality high resolution digital files you will be able to export your record as these separate tracks using this software I'm going to show you exactly how to do it so the program we're going to download as the example for this video is a program called audacity many of you may have heard this before but it has been a very good very reliable open source audio recording medium for many years now it's been developed over the years and it's very very reliable and very easy to use as I say even better still it's not going to cost you a penny so we're going to go download that now and then once you've downloaded and installed that I'm going to go straight into the program I'm going to walk you through step by step step how to transfer your record into audacity when we open up this program we're going to do a little bit of setup first before we can get started we need to make sure our audio settings are set up correctly and that we've got a track to record onto so let's get straight into that bit first so the first thing you're going to want to do is go to the audio setup Tab and this will enable us to select our inputs and our outputs in terms of the audio coming into and out of audacity so from here once you click down here this useful tab comes up that clearly labels everything and it's pretty self-explanatory really the playback device you know what are you going to use to monitor what's been recorded into audacity in this case we're using the MacBook Pro speakers which is fine and then for the recording device what are we using to record our records into audacity in this case of course as I mentioned briefly already we're going to use the convenience of the Riga mini phono preamp which has that USB output so we're going to select the USB output of the rigafono preamp from here and then lastly the only other setting you need to look at from this tab in particular is the fact that we want to ensure that we are we are indeed recording both the left and the right channel by selecting stereo now the next thing we're going to want to do is to determine our audio quality preferences so if we go to the the preferences tab up here and then we select quality on the left we can set our sample rate and we can set our bit depth now what you can choose here will be determined to a degree on the device you're using if you're using the same device I'm using today if you're using the Riga phono preamp then you will be limited to 16 bits and 48 kilohertz as the higher amount which is in terms of the sample rate that is a topped above CD quality as you may know CD quality is 44.1 and 16 bit that's the Baseline you certainly don't want to go any lower than this because you will hear noticeable degrading in quality and of course there's a lot of debate out there about how much benefit there is in going to these higher sample rates in terms of the capability of human hearing I'm not going to get into that in great detail today but what I would say is that it is worth going higher if you can afford the storage space because it will take up more space in terms of the files will be larger that you're recording so if you can go higher there's really no harm in doing so the sample rate will determine the range of frequencies that you can capture within the digital system and going to a higher bit depth will increase the dynamic range of the system and also reduce the overall digital noise floor within the system as well so if you can go up to 24 bit by all means do so it will increase the file size but you know hard disk space is pretty affordable these days so go for a high quality I I would question whether there's really any point going any higher than certainly 96 gigahertz at that point I would really question whether anyone can honestly look me in the eye and tell me that they can hear the difference between 44.8 and I'm sorry 96 um kilohertz and say going up to 192. I think that really is overkill particularly when we're dealing with the kind of dynamic range that we'll be capturing and certainly in terms of the bit depth any higher than 24 orbit is certainly Overkill when we're talking about the kind of dynamic range and the kind of the range of frequencies that we're going to be capturing from a vinyl record so in this instance we're going to set that to 16 bit and we're going to go as high as we're allowed to with this audio device at 48 kilohertz sample rate now just to give you an idea of what stepping up to a separate USB audio interface would give you in many regards as long as it has the capability of course the ssl2 plus is my other USB audio interface that I use for everything else I use it for recording YouTube videos for recording music that kind of side of things really good quality little compact USB audio interface that would allow me to crank the quality right up to 24 bit 192 kilohertz now that is pretty damn good now if you can afford the hard disk space and you want the peace of mind to just capture the best possible digital audio quality then why not knock yourself out and go and do so back over in audacity we now need to create the actual track that we're going to record on onto so if we go to tracks up at the top here and then add new and we want to select a stereo track last thing I recommend you check before starting the recording is to enable the software monitoring so if you go to the recording tab in the preferences section here you'll see a tab that says software playthrough of input that will enable you to in real time hear the record play as you're recording it through audacity and however you're monitoring it I recommend that you monitor if you can using a set of headphones because this stops any of the sound getting back into the room and potentially back into your cartridge and ultimately clouding your vinyl recording so with that checked we are now basically ready to go so what we can do is we can monitor our input and make sure that the level is at the point where we're not too quiet but also not so loud up here at zero DB where we would start to get Distortion so if we check this we can then start monitoring I can lower the stylus in a place where I know that the record is going to be relatively loud and we can make sure that our level going in is an appropriate setting the Riga phono preamp has a really handy level setting on the front that enables us to increase the USB recording output or decrease it if we're getting too much Distortion so that makes it very convenient and very easy with just a single dial in order to set this and what we're aiming for here really is that we're not wanting to be too quiet because we want to get good signal to noise ratio but we also don't want to be hitting 0db in a digital system that is basically the it's a full stop at that point if you go any higher than 0 DB you can't you just get it just turns into digital clipping so we don't want to be hitting that zero DB and we don't want to be too far down here either a good Benchmark is to keep yourself somewhere between the -6 and -12 DB range just bear in mind we just want plenty of Headroom to make sure we don't go anywhere near that zero DB point of clipping before we do any recording whatso so having monitored the audio input to make sure that there's not going to be any digital clipping I'm now happy that we're ready to record so all we need to do is hit that big red record button up at the top here start spinning the record and you'll get a little bit of Silence of course which we can edit out later but as soon as the music starts to play you'll get a digital representation of it on your screen and you can go away make yourself a hot drink if you like go chill out somewhere or listen to the music if you prefer and enjoy it whilst your record transfers to your computer so here's our recording of side a we are finished in terms of that side of things and all I've done for the moment is I've paused the recording process by pressing pause here and we can resume the recording of side B when we're ready but of course we're going to want to clean the stylus flip over the record make sure that that side is nice and clean and then we can resume the same process for side b as well so for the purpose of demonstration I'm going to stop at side a because I really want to show you how you can export as individual tracks and apply some metadata that can be understood by music players music library so we can build a real Library around the music and it's not just random files called track one trap2 that kind of side of things we want to be able to load it up into a music player be able to see the album title see the artist and the individual track name so the way we would do this is to apply some metadata so if we go up to the edit function here and go to metadata you can see that we can input this information so this is a copy of John coltrane's I love Supreme so I'm going to put that in here and then over to there a Love Supreme of course there's only two tracks for us to deal with on this side which makes it easy as a demonstration so I'll click ok I'm just going to leave it at that as the basics there you could go further put the year in there and genre and some other additional comments whatever you want to do but I'm going to keep it to the basics for this demonstration you get the idea click OK and that is the basic album details done what we want to do now is apply labels where the individual tracks are you can see here this is where track two starts as early two traps to the side as I say so what we want to do is want to be able to zoom in and find the beginning of each track so we're going to go here so with it zoomed in I'm just going to make sure that's the beginning of the track I can hear it start to come in there yep so I'm going to add in my first trap label here add a selection and we can put in the name just for convenience I've got the track names loaded in here and we're going to call that acknowledgment there and then we'll zoom out again and find where the second track starts to things around about here we can hear yeah the silence in there but I need to zoom in using these Zoom buttons here of course just up at the top you can use the shortcuts that are labeled there as well but these are the buttons that you would want to use let's just make sure that this is the beginning you won't be able to hear this of course on this demo but you can see what I'm doing I'm listening for the silence [Music] and that is where I want to start so I want to add my second track label here at that point to add a selection you can see that it adds it down there and enables me to put in the second track name and those are our individual track labels we now going to export the entire thing track by track one thing I have forgotten to do that I nearly missed as a step that is obviously vital is I need to remove The Unwanted noise at the end of the recording otherwise my second track is going to have the run out Groove rocking round and round and I don't really want that it will spoil the seamlessness of the album when we come to record and do side two as well so we want to go to the end of the track here and you want to delete any unwanted noise or any unwanted elements of the recording here just by clicking and dragging on your mouse and then pressing the backspace key to delete the end and now we are ready to export our two tracks so to do so we go to file and then go to export and then go to export multiple now what this is going to enable us to do quite cleverly makes it really light work is to export based on the two labels that we created so makes it really quick to create individual tracks it's really quite useful and clever so what we're going to need to do of course is pick a folder for this to be saved into so we're going to go to a Love Supreme I created a folder here already on my desktop I'm going to click OK and then we need to choose the file format that we want to save as there are a number of options in here and there is totally uncompressed options like dot wav and aiff those are the best options if you're wanting to create a master file of your recording but there are of course the conveniences of both lossy and losses compressed formats in here like MP3 is a lossy file format and Flac as a lossless file format as well but for the purpose of this I want a completely uncompressed version of my recording so I'm going to select dot wav for the purpose of this demonstration so once we've done that then we're going to basically use the track label use the labels as the track names so that's very convenient for us and we don't want to include the audio before the first label because that would include the needle drop there as well so based on this we are essentially ready to go so I'll click export and it will start to populate my meta tags with the individual track names which is really clever so the first one comes up as track one and the trap title comes up as acknowledgment based on my label I'll click ok to that to accept it and then the second one comes up automatically as well and then resolution is there this is now track two and we click OK and it will start to export the tracks you can see here we've got a confirmation message just to say that it's successfully exported those two files so we just click ok so if we go to the folder where we just save those you'll see that the file names have been applied correctly and if you were to open this up in a music player it would also add the name of the artist and also the name of the album it's worth mentioning though with something like apple music for example the old iTunes Now Apple music if you want the metadata to work you will really need to use the AI FF the Apple specific file format for that just to show you what that kind of looked like looks like when it comes into a library like apple music you can see that this is what my exports look like based on those two tracks adding the title of the album there and also obviously the artist's name as well it's collated them into an album so that I could build a library digitally of my vinyl recordings the good news is once you've got those trap labels there inside audacity exporting is multiple different file formats match becomes really really simple all you need to do is repeat the export process and change the file format that you want so there you have it you've now got your record archived into your computer and into a digital playback library of some sorts I hope you found this useful I hope it inspires you to incorporate this process into your vinyl Hobby in some way if you've missed any of the steps and would like some further instructions then there will be a link in the description below where you can check out step-by-step instructions including screenshots over at the sound matters website there'll also be a list of products down there that you can link to so just for your convenience you can go pick up those products to help you get on your way with your vinyl archiving process but if you do have any further questions by all means do drop us a comment in the comment section Below in this video I'd be happy to help as much as I can to get you on your way and also if you're new to this channel then please do consider subscribing we'd love to have you on board thank you ever so much for the support that I've received from the YouTube community so far it means an awful lot to me and I look forward to seeing you all in that next video keep spinning

Channel: Sound Matters

Views: 26,664

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Id: MRrT3Q67YX0

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 21 2022