[kmccaf]

Hi All,

I know there are some audiophiles on this board, and was wondering if anyone has any tips, or a good resource for converting  vinyl records to a digital file.

Thanks a lot,
Kyle

[Hokerer]

There was some discussion of vinyl to digital in this thread from not too long ago...

http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=9722.0

[kmccaf]

Ah, thank you! I knew I had seen this on one of the forums. Now I have to consider which record player to get with a usb port. Doesn't seem as big a pain as I was once led to believe.

[timberati]

I have used Golden Records' vinyl to CD program (since it works on Mac's Power PC) with less than perfect results. You have to title all the information yourself, add/remove pieces of bits of music, and generally fiddle a long time for mediocre results (muddy sound quality and skipping portions of songs--due to buffering problems) . The modest plus this program (and Audacity) is that no usb turntable is needed, you can use a standard turntable and use the output from the headphone output.

[The Professor]

There are various ways to do it...the USB turntables that have recently come available certainly do the job, but if you're fussy about audio quality they can fall short.  They use cheap ceramic cartridge pickups as opposed to the magnetic pickups on a better turntable.

So if you already have a good turntable, there are a number of USB devices that provide a means to connect your existing turntable to your 'puter via USB and these will generally sound much better than the inexpensive USB turntables that have cropped up.

But, again, if you're not terribly fussy about high end audio and you don't already own a turntable, the "USB ready" turntables may be good enough. 
You'll still need a software program for the capture, and Audacity is a good cross platform program for doing this, and works very well.  If you happen to be on a Mac, you can just use  Quicktime (which comes with the OS)  to do a simple capture.

[kmccaf]

Well, I am a little fussy about the audio quality. I may be getting in a little over my head, but from conversations I have had, here goes: I would like the sample rate to be 96kHz done at 24bits. The other thing I was looking to do was place the recordings uncompressed on an external hard drive using jpeg 2000. Any thoughts as to how I would accomplish this with a usb drive turntable? I own a very old turntable, and I feel that to adapt it would cost as much as buying a new turntable. My old one is not that good so buying something new would be fine by me.

[denny]

Well, I am a little fussy about the audio quality. I may be getting in a little over my head, but from conversations I have had, here goes: I would like the sample rate to be 96kHz done at 24bits. The other thing I was looking to do was place the recordings uncompressed on an external hard drive using jpeg 2000. Any thoughts as to how I would accomplish this with a usb drive turntable? I own a very old turntable, and I feel that to adapt it would cost as much as buying a new turntable. My old one is not that good so buying something new would be fine by me.

You won't hear any difference at 24/96.  That's a good choice for editing workstations in order to account for rounding errors, but it's really unnecessary as a listening standard.