Burning it up

Spent much of the weekend burning old vinyl to the iPod. The albums sit in crates in the garage these days - kind of a sad exile for my once-beloved collection. But they spent pretty much all of the 90's and this decade in a storage bin, cold and dark, no witness to the changing seasons or the many, many changes in my life. My old friends, my means of escape and glimmers of inspiration and benchmarks of an earlier life...like so much clutter now, and for so long.

Well, at least they're back in my own garage, and since May when I took them out of storage and we made room on shelves, I can actually visit with them sometimes. And I have, silly as that may sound. I have a strange relationship with things, and collections of things have their own unique character. It resides in the collective, and passes on some of that character to its individual pieces.

Sharon got me a pretty nice USB turntable for my birthday last spring, and I've used it on and off. Ripped five or six albums today - some old Tangerine Dream, REM, other things. I was reasonably pleased that most of what I have burned so far came from vinyl in serviceable condition. One REM record had irreconcilable warping/skipping on the first two songs (I ended up buying those two songs from iTunes to complete the album), but the others had little more than a thin veneer of popping and scratching. I guess I kept better care of my albums than I remember.

The turntable itself came with a sort of EZ burn software, that burns directly to MP3 and then prompts iTunes for an import into M4A. After some trial and error, though, I've settled on a different process that delivers higher fidelity sound, with only some drawbacks related to song titling, file size and file maintenance/handling:

1) Pulled down Audacity, a freeware sound recording and editing proggie, installed on my laptop.

2) Set up Audacity to record as .wav files. A few simple but necessary tweaks to the configuration may be found here.

3) Cue up an album, set Audacity to record, and just record the whole side. I started out babysitting it, but realized I didn't really have to - I just note the time and return in 15-18 minutes.

4) When the side is done, pause Audacity, flip the album, cue up, un-pause the program and repeat. Whole album on one wav file.

5) When done with the album, I save the Audacity project as .wav (I do 44K). It creates a pretty large file - 300mb to 500mb per album.

6) I transfer the wav file onto a flash drive, load onto my desktop (which also has Audacity), and proceed to edit.

7) Using the cursor function in Audacity, I select each song (usually have to expand the visibility range with the magnifying glass function), identify the beginning and end of each track, highlight that segment with the Audacity cursor, then Edit/Export Selection As Wav, title the file with the track title.

8) Bring up iTunes, navigate to the folder where I've stored the individual songs, and select Edit/Add File to Library. Once they're in iTunes, I highlight the whole batch, right click and apply Artist and Album Name under the Get Info tab (so I only have to do this piece once.) Save, then edit each individual Get Info tab with song name and sequence.

9) Plug in the iPod, sync up, and off we go.

A few notes on this process.

a) It leaves in all the scratches and surface noise. Audacity has filters that will suppress the minor white noise, but I haven't messed with them. YMMV.

b) This isn't for Nano users. The resulting wav files are huge - but the sound quality far exceeds that of M4A, and is (IMO) noticeably better than MP3. I have a 30 gb iPOd, all but 8 or 9 of my albums are M4A. You'd pack a 30gb iPod pretty quickly with all wav files - so, this process isn't for the storage-challenged. Of course, you can get by with a smaller player, and just swap music on and off it.

c) I usually adjust volume in iTunes (turn it up to about 70%) on all my uploads, wav or MP3/M4A. You can do that on Get Info/Options/Volume Adjustment. I have found it works more reliably once the files on the iPod, rather than pre-synced iTunes files.

d) I've noticed that iTunes will seem to add a leading sequence number to the track title if you play the file in iTunes. Annoying, didn't see that in iTunes v8. Also, be careful about song titles, sequence numbers and artist/album names when entering them on Get Info - mistyping any of these will create headaches in sequencing and grouping your music on the player.

e) It's a little weird to listen to stuff on an iPod with surface noise, pops and scratches if you've spent years listening to music on CD's or digital players.

f) It helps alot having more than one PC to do this - I was editing one machine while recording on another.

g) Leave yourself time to do this - even using the EZ Record software, it's still time consuming if labeling individual track titles matters to you.

h) Have a decent sized flash drive and at least one set of headphones handy.

i) Prepare to puzzle over why you liked some of this stuff to begin with...