The hope of Audacity: vinyl conversion tips

Avid readers of this blog may remember that one of my projects last year was to convert my favourite vinyl records to a digital format. It took me a while - in the end I converted around 660 tracks from about 120 different records (LPs, 12"s and 7"s, with a couple of 10"s for good measure!), which added up to over 40 hours worth of music.

I started the project sometime in mid-March last year and completed it sometime in mid-July, and having been listening to the resulting tracks on my laptop since then, I thought it was high time that I wrote up what I learned about the process. So here it is:

Hardware: I used my old Goodmans turntable (pictured above) hooked up to my old PC via a preamplifier unit. This set up seemed to work pretty well, although afterwards I wished that I had 1) invested in a new needle for the turntable, and 2) found a way to earth the turntable (to reduce the background hum on the recordings).

Software: my PC was running under Windows XP and I used Audacity (version 1.3.7) to capture and process the audio from the turntable arrangement:


As the PC is quite old I learned that it's sensible to close down all other programs and background processes (including screensavers) during the actual recordings - if the load on the system got too high then the resulting recordings sometimes ended up with skips that weren't on the original record.

Recording process: the procedure that I developed for each record was something like this:

• Fix the recording level in Audacity: the idea is to set the input volume level as high as possible whilst avoiding "clipping" of the recorded waveform. I'd do this by trial and error, by making test recordings from parts of the record that I thought were likely to be the loudest. Once I found the optimum level I made a note of it, in case I needed to re-record later on if I discovered a problem during playback.
  
• Clean the needle and the record: to reduce surface noise and the likelihood of pops, crackles and skips.
• Record each side of the disc in a single take: while the record was playing I would listen for "defects" such as pops/crackles, skips, drop-outs, making a note of the timecode for each as I heard it. (A comfortable pair of headphones is recommended if you're doing more than a few recordings.)
  

Post-processing: once I'd recorded one side, I'd save it as a single Audacity project and then do some post-processing of the recording to deal with the sound defects. I found this quite time consuming as I got a bit obsessive over cleaning up the recordings. The strategies that I used included:

• Click removal tool: Audacity's Click removal tool (under the Effects menu) sometimes worked for me when trying to remove pops and crackles, but I found it a bit hit-and-miss to be honest.
  
• De-amplification: essentially highlighting the waveform around a pop and then applying amplification to e.g. -8db, using the Amplify tool (also under the Effects menu).
  
• Copy-and-paste: very fiddly technique but could be quite effective, using the options under the Edit menu I would copy a bit of the waveform from elsewhere in the track and then use this to replace the part with the defect.

De-amplification and copy-and-paste techniques generally worked okay for crackles and pops that were very short. On a couple of occasions where the recording had skipped I was also able to copy-and-paste longer sections to repair it, although it could be difficult to match the inserted section up with the original track.

Once the defects had been dealt with I applied RIAA equalisation (under the Effects menu) to the whole track. At this point I sometimes also applied amplification to the whole thing, if it turned out that I'd chosen a recording level that was a bit too quiet.

Check the recording & split into tracks: the final part of the ripping process was to check each recording by playing it back through Audacity (to ensure that it was complete and that there weren't any unexpected skips which might necessitate a re-recording), and then to break it up into individual tracks. To do this I added "labels" to the project to mark the start of each track, and then used the Export multiple option to automatically save them as WAV files.

(An aside: WAV files are uncompressed so they are big! But because it's "loss-less", I reasoned that this would be a good "archival" format if I wanted to play around some more with a track later on. I've since wondered about converting them to FLAC, which would save disk space whilst preserving the data.)

Import into iTunes: since I use iTunes to manage my music for "everyday use", I used it to generate compressed AAC-format versions for each track as it was added to the iTunes library:

• In Edit Preferences->Advanced tab, deselect "Copy files to iTunes Music when adding to library".
• Select the files to add to the library using File->Add Folder option (n.b. drag and drop also works).
• Once the WAV files have been added, right-click on the first imported track in iTunes, select Update info and add data about the artist, album name, number of tracks and so on. (Note that it's also possible to select multiple tracks and add data for several at once.)
  
• Select the imported tracks, right-click on them and select Create AAC version from the menu. (The resulting AAC tracks will contain the artist and album data added in the previous step.)
• At the end, the library will contain two versions of each track - the original WAV file and the AAC version - so I went through and deleted the WAV versions from iTunes (note that this doesn't delete the original files, just the references to them).

Hopefully this all makes sense. It can be a long process and there are probably better ways of doing things, however this worked for me. If I did it again I'd seriously consider investing in a dedicated USB turntable, but for now in spite of the tedium of the process I'm happy to be able to listen to my old tunes on my ipod shuffle.

Swimming on the Box

I've been meaning for a while now to post something about recent(ish) swimming-themed TV programmes, but what with catching up after Christmas, New Year and all the rest I've been somewhat distracted until now.

Anyways: I love swimming, but ordinarily I find that watching things like Olympic swimming on the telly is just about the most boring thing ever. With competitive swimming it's almost as if the participants are in a rush to finish and get out of the water - whereas I sometimes think I'd like to stay in the water and swim around all day.

So it was interesting to see a few shows at the end of last year which seemed more relevant to my experiences as a recreational swimmer. The first was back at the end of November, with the BBC documentary "Virgin Swimmers" (part of the "Wonderland" series). This followed a disparate group of adults as they took a course of weekly swimming lessons together, and reminded me a little of similar classes that I took a few years ago. The people in the programme were just regular folk, but what was fascinating was how learning swim often seemed emblematic of a deeper need to take on a challenge and prove something to themselves. Somehow it's not just about learning to swim.

I suppose that people do all sorts of things - like, I don't know, rock climbing or hang-gliding - to challenge themselves in a similar fashion, and perhaps the "challenge" of swimming in a pool at a local community centre seems quite mundane. But what this programme brought out was that for the people that do it, it can be just as much of a challenge - and an achievement - as climbing a mountain.

The second programme was the two-parter "Robson Green's Wild Swimming Adventure", shown on ITV in December (certainly an odd time of year for a show about the joys of swimming outdoors). When I first heard about this, I'll admit I was a little sceptical and wondered if it was just an attempt to capitalise on the resurgence of interest in outdoor swimming here in the UK.

In the event, in spite of some contrived sequences (I'm wasn't entirely convinced by either the opening scene - when he's rescued from his swim in the freezing waters of the river Tyne in Newcastle - or the closing one, when he swims with his young son in the sea) Robson Green actually turns out to be a very engaging, humorous and enthusiastic host with a genuine love for swimming. He swims in various extremely pleasant locations and has interesting conversations with the various characters he meets there, but ultimately the focus becomes his desire to attempt a swim to Holy Island (off the coast of Northumberland) in memory of his late father.

As a result his outdoor swims leading up to this get tougher - including swims in a freezing Snowdonian lake with environmentalist and extreme cold water swimmer Lewis Gordon Pugh, and across the infamous Corryvreckan whirlpool (which nearly did for George Orwell). Outdoor swimming seems to have been rebranded as "wild swimming", when it's usually nothing of the sort - but these swims were truly wild. So by the end I was completely convinced by his commitment to experience all the highs and lows that outdoor swimming could throw at him. Monumental.

Staying on the outdoor theme, the last set of programmes was Channel 4's "Great Swim" series, which covered the "Great Swim" events that took place at the end of last summer in London, Strathclyde, Windermere and Suffolk. Each one featured races between professional swimmers, however the main focus were the mass participation events where basically anyone could take part and swim a mile. Following my own outdoor swimming adventures last summer (nothing wild about those at all), I would really have liked to have taken part in one of these mass swims but it didn't work out; at least through these programmes I was able to watch some other regular folk swimming and talking about their motivations and experiences.

So... here's to some great swimming in 2010!