Digitizing My LP Collection

[Hunter Ellington]

I'm new to the group, so be gentle. These may be stupid questions, so here goes. I have an LP collection of about 1200 records. Most are in very good to excellent condition, and many are quite rare, if not arcane. I am recently retired so I am embarking on this project now that I have time. I want to digitize the collection and store it on a NAS for playback. I will keep the LP's, and continue to play them, but if I can store them digitally, and organize the music, I will play a lot more music more often. Also, there is a convenience factor. So, for burning the LP's to a NAS, how much computing power do I need, what sound cards should I consider, and what music editing software gets the job done ( I've been reading about Goldwave and Wave Corrector). Also, I will want to record at the highest quality level I can achieve (no MP3). I have wandered through this site and have not found an archive which probably would have covered this subject so any direction will be greatly appreciated.

 

[WaynePflughaupt]

It doesn’t take much computer power. I did a number of albums with the Compaq I used to use (about 10 years old now) and it worked fine.

If you’re concerned about maximum sound quality you’ll want a good sound card with a first-class A/D converter. At the time I didn’t trust the sound card I had so I bought a used Pioneer CD recorder and a few music CD-RWs.

Be prepared, this is a time consuming process. There is no way to do it fast. After making the digital recording in real time you’ll have to divide it into tracks, and will probably want to do some clean up as well. Here’s recent post I made on this topic with some info you might find useful.

Audacity is a decent free-ware audio editing program that’s user friendly if a bit clunky (it doesn’t do any EQ, gain adjustments etc. in real time). For more flexibility (and I think the ability to automatically divide tracks) it might be worth a few bucks to go with Acoustica.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt