LP's to CD - best method

[TimboW]

I hope reader's don't mind my posting here. As it's a general area I though my questions would be best posted here.

I have a large collection of LP's (over 1,500) many of which I wish to transfer over to CD. I have all of the necessary hardware and software and have no problem's transferring material over to my computer where I can work on it, but the problem is I'm not sure what form to save them in from the LPs. I want to maintain as high a quality as I can in the process so I don't want to compress the material to MP3 format only to expand it again to CDA for the CD's. There are a number of options available to me to maintain the files at full uncompressed size, such as .WAV format, but which of them is best for the job?

Any thoughts on the matter would be much appreciated.

Tim

 

[jaxvon]

I hope reader's don't mind my posting here. As it's a general area I though my questions would be best posted here.

I have a large collection of LP's (over 1,500) many of which I wish to transfer over to CD. I have all of the necessary hardware and software and have no problem's transferring material over to my computer where I can work on it, but the problem is I'm not sure what form to save them in from the LPs. I want to maintain as high a quality as I can in the process so I don't want to compress the material to MP3 format only to expand it again to CDA for the CD's. There are a number of options available to me to maintain the files at full uncompressed size, such as .WAV format, but which of them is best for the job?

Any thoughts on the matter would be much appreciated.

Tim

Since WAVs are the format that will end up on the CD, it would be best to record your LPs as a WAV.

 

[MDS]

WAV is the only format you can use when recording from LP/Tape/Whatever. The sound card is going to perform analog to digital conversion and since a WAV file is simply a sequence of PCM samples preceded by a header that describes the format of the data, it's the closest thing to raw PCM possible.

Programs that say they 'record to MP3' create an intermediate WAV, encode to MP3, and then delete the WAV (although some may have an option to keep the WAV around).

 

[JKL1960]

I'll second wav format.

Before taking this on I would put together a list and check into actually just re-purchasing some of these records on CD format. You may find this is actually cheaper for some titles when you consider your time. There is probably a price point where you would sooner just buy it than use your time converting. Sound quality is likely (but not guaranteed) better depending on the condition of the vinyl. You will capture every scratch, click and pop on the vinyl.

 

[audiofox]

I believe that WAV and AIFF both consist of uncompressed PCM audio data (AIFF for Macs), but they are not the actual data format used for CDs. This Wikipedia page has some relevant info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV

 

[MDS]

WAV and AIFF are essentially the same with the only real difference being the order of the bytes in a sample (little-endian vs big-endian). They are both just a sequence of PCM samples. WAV is predominant on Intel CPU based machines.

The samples on a CD are PCM but they are not in linear order as in a computer based format. When you rip a CD, the PCM samples are read, placed in order [left channel sample 1, right channel sample 1, left channel sample 2, right channel sample 2...] and the WAV header is calculated and prepended to the samples to form a file that is then saved with a .wav extension.

 

[krabapple]

Another option is to store the wav files as lossless compressed flac or Wavpak
files -- these retain all the data, in smaller files. When you are ready to burn them to CD, expand the flac/Wavpak files back to .wav.

Lossless compression can reduce file size by up to ~50%.

 

[storm]

I'll second wav format.

Before taking this on I would put together a list and check into actually just re-purchasing some of these records on CD format. You may find this is actually cheaper for some titles when you consider your time. There is probably a price point where you would sooner just buy it than use your time converting. Sound quality is likely (but not guaranteed) better depending on the condition of the vinyl. You will capture every scratch, click and pop on the vinyl.

This is an excellent suggestion. I started buying CDs of LPs I have several years ago and have found that (1) I have more LPs than I thought that don't have any value to me (as a CD or LP-transfer), (2) many of the CDs are re-mastered and the sound quality is very impressive (some hold their own very well when played side by side with vinyl), (3) good prices on CDs are available on Amazon and some of its resellers.