Favorite and prized vinyl collections!

[MikeA]

Actually Willy, this is very similar to what I bought. $12.95 with $9 shipping but I didn't look hard at eBay...this was the first one that came up.

http://cgi.ebay.com/RIAA-Phono-Pream...1|293:1|294:50

The above is sold ready to rock n roll complete with the patch cords you need to run from the amp to the sound card (or other device)

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Phono-Preamp...|39:1|240:1318

The one above doesn't have the amp to soundcard wires or patchcables. But you can readily obtain them from any Radioshack store.

I add one last thing here.....you do NOT have to "remaster" a vinyl platter if it is in good condition. In fact you don't "HAVE" to remaster one that is in BAD condition.

The ripping part is easy. You only need some software that will let you save it in MP3 format. I like MP3 because things like WinAmp and Windows Media Player don't have trouble with that format. Once you can play it in one of those pieces of software, you can burn it to Audio format.

In fact, you might be able to rip directly from one of those two standard computer "players". I'm not sure about that though.

Two pieces of free software you can use to "rip" the vinyl is Messer and the other is Audacity. I purchased a product called "RIP-Vinyl" for $8 or $10. The only advantage to RipVinyl is that it can be set to detect the silence between tracks and split them for you so you don't have to go back and find the beginning and end of each track in the original rip.

[Ive always been a dreamer]

I also have a large collection of vinyls, but the majority of them are 45's because that is mostly all I could afford back in the day. However, I have all of The Beatles albums in vinyl, as well as, all of the Eagles albums (except LROOE). My problem is that I don't know exactly where they are, but they are around this house somewhere. And speaking of LROOE - Just an FYI, but Peekaboo has a picture of the vinyl album posted in the Eagles memorabilia thread along with her other Eagles albums.

Unfortunately, I didn't take very good care of my albums back then, and they haven't been played in many, many years so I don't know what shape they're in. Today, when I buy a new CD, I immediately burn myself copies, and put the original away. That way, when they get scratched from all of the abuse they receive in my car, I can just burn another one.

[TimothyBFan]

Mike--Is the ones you have above the same as this one that I was talking about? I would like to make it as simple as I can. According to my friend Chris, with his turntable, everything goes right into his Itunes.

http://www.ionaudio.com/urecord

tbsf--I love the Monkees and have been trying to get them reasonably. Find your LP's if you can -they are probably worth some good money. I haven't hardly been able to touch them for the price I will pay. I am looking in particular for More Of The Monkees because it has Mary Mary on it! Love that song by them! They are hard to come by.

[MikeA]

Mike--Is the ones you have above the same as this one that I was talking about? I would like to make it as simple as I can. According to my friend Chris, with his turntable, everything goes right into his Itunes.

http://www.ionaudio.com/urecord

tbsf--I love the Monkees and have been trying to get them reasonably. Find your LP's if you can -they are probably worth some good money. I haven't hardly been able to touch them for the price I will pay. I am looking in particular for More Of The Monkees because it has Mary Mary on it! Love that song by them! They are hard to come by.

I can't be sure Willy. If that is something that your friend has and it WORKS, then if you have confidence in using it, I'd say go for it. I don't go directly into anything with my rips. I either capture them as MP3s and upload them to my Cell Phone which doubles as my MP3 player or I burn them to Audio CDs.

It sounds like the device you have is configured to go straight from either a line-in or a turntable into an iPod or iTunes and I know nothing about either of those devices nor how to load them from a stored MP3.

[TimothyBFan]

tbsf--I love the Monkees and have been trying to get them reasonably. Find your LP's if you can -they are probably worth some good money. I haven't hardly been able to touch them for the price I will pay. I am looking in particular for More Of The Monkees because it has Mary Mary on it! Love that song by them! They are hard to come by.

Right after I wrote this above I went on ebay and actually found one for .99 that was ending within the hour -and won it!!

[tbs fanatic]

Ha! Good for you. I didn't realize they were so hard to come by. We must be related tbf - both love Timmy and both love The Monkees Or maybe it's that we are both too .

[jdubfan]

In a catalog I received at Christmas time, there was a stand-alone Crosley unit where you put the record on the turntable and it burned a CD, they had the outside look like an old-time radio. Does anybody have any experience with something like that? It was ~250$ if I remember right. I don't have an ipod or phone or even a pc with a burner right now. (Guess I'm really stuck in the 70s.) It's not something I can do right now after spending $$ on dang Eagle tix. Hopefully that technology will get cheaper in the future. I've got around 700 hundred albums that are currently doing time collecting dust, I'd sure like to hear 'em again.

[Brooke]

I've seen these, too, jdf. You might check out ebay for a cheaper one. I've seen them there before, but am still not ready to spend that much on one.

That's quite an album collection you've got!

[Just Another Hired Hand]

I have a very eclectic collection of vinyl and probably couldn't come close to listing it without taking an afternoon and sorting them out. I know I have the James Gang platters. Most of Fleetwood Mac both before and during the association with Nicks and Buckingham. Some Zep. Doobies. Boston. Kansas. Peter Paul and Mary. CSN&Y. Buffalo Springfield. Yes. A couple of Beatles (Abby Road and White and Rubber Soul and maybe Sgt Peppers). Several of the outlaw albums (Waylon, Willy, Hank Jr.) Melanie. Jewel. Joplin. Hendrix.

Basically, I never trashed an album and never sold one. However, after Verna and I hooked up, I gave several to my niece who babysat our kids a lot. Unfortunately, those that I gave to her are now long gone.

Okay, you have the vinyl and you listen to them on the patio. Do you anything else with them? If you still have a turntable you can buy a cheap little turntable amp that you can plug into and run the output to your line-in on your sound card. It's simple from that point to "rip" the vinyl to any digital format that your capture program can handle.

There is "Audacity" which is a freeware program that will record and save ripped sessions into virtually any format you wish (MP3 WAV etc....but not WMP...Microsoft has not released that format nor has Apple released MPEG4).

Once you have them captured, you can go back in with Audacity or even EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and actually "remaster" them to a degree. I say to a degree because they will not be "better than new" no matter how careful you are. But if there are obnoxious "pops" you can isolate those and remove them pretty much as simple as doing a cut and paste operation on a Word Document.

It is a very tedious process.

Unfortunately the vinyl passed me by. However I did use Audacity to digitize a few old cassettes I came across. It is a great program. If you dub them with a good tape deck there is almost no evidence of "wow" and "flutter". I used a Sony for a few and a Marantz for the rest.

The noise is also less of a factor. If I could undo something in the past I would have held on to my vinyl. My son has managed to accumulate a lot of it...unfortunately he is not an Eagles fan. He doesn't like "drummers that sing." I reply, "Your generation knows nothing of good music or the talent that makes it."

[MikeA]

Unfortunately the vinyl passed me by. However I did use Audacity to digitize a few old cassettes I came across. It is a great program. If you dub them with a good tape deck there is almost no evidence of "wow" and "flutter". I used a Sony for a few and a Marantz for the rest.

I'm having a blast with Audacity! I mentioned it here because it has the ability to record any sound coming across your sound card as far as I know. CD, Line-In, Aux, Mic, even the telephone if you have it connected through a modem! So, for "ripping" it's great. And anything you "rip", you can EDIT! Remove pops, add reverb, compress, even Over Dub! You can mix it merge it, even flip it around and play it backwards (You Beatles Fans get a twing right there? <LOL>)

But I'm using it to record tracks on my guitar clean and then go back and add all sorts of effects. I download a plug-in for it last night that has 98 guitar effects....wahwah, echo, phaser, flange, delay, overtones...you name it. An absolute hoot.

But where it really shines is that you can lay down a rythym track and the replay it while playing lead part over it. Well, technically "beside" it and then merge the two tracks (after you "time slip" one of them to be in sync) to get one combined sound file! You can even come back a third or fourth time and lay down vocal tracks over what you just played.

This is one of the most powerful freebies I have ever found. Comparable to software mixing packages costing well over $100.

Borders apparently will not allow MP3 files here but you can go to the following link and listen to a really short sample what I did last night just to see what it could do with a little scale run in the E Blues Scale, first position.

I ran the scale (about 9 seconds) clean with no distortion, no reverb but with the gain on my little Marshall cranked up to get a bit of a "blues" sound. Then I started playing around with it with Audacity. I first compressed it to get a lot more gain out of the really quiet recording I'd made. Barely hear it through the amp I had it set so low. I then added a little echo using a room type echo. Had to crank in some wahwah. Then I added a little flange to it and a touch of phaser that you can hardly hear. Oh, I then duplicated the track and synced it up with the original and compressed the second track again. The results are at the following address:

http://www.mvabercrombie.net/mv2guest/test.mp3