Turning Records into CDs

By Kenny Williams

One of the most powerful aspects of music is that it has the ability to take you back to those special times and places that warm your heart. I am instantly taken back to Barbados and getting engaged to my wife every time I hear Wild World by Cat Stevens. It is like a personal time machine that allows you to renew the memories that define your existence. This powerful type of experience is the reason why so many people develop a large collection of music albums over the course of their life.

Prior to this digital age we live in was a time when the LP was king. The LP was considered the best way to reproduce sound. The problem now is that it's virtually impossible to find a record player for sale, much less a replacement needle for it. I searched the Internet for an hour with no luck and really made Seth, king of Radio Shack, work for his money searching for an answer to my question. Because of situations like this, I decided to start converting some of my old albums to CD.

Seth is an Audio recording expert and he shared a few recording tips with me. I followed them and saved bunches of time, and possibly some pain. Since Seth was kind enough to share his wisdom with me, I feel obligated to pass the information on to you.

The process involves using a turntable (or cassette tape player for tapes), a stereo, a computer with a sound card and 1 GB of extra space, some audio recording software, and a CD-RW recorder. I would have to say that the hardest part of this process is accurately transferring the music from the stereo to the computer. Once you have the music recorded to your hard drive, you can use software that can automate the recording process down to a few clicks of the mouse.

To begin, I connected my turntable to my stereo, and then the stereo to my computer. To connect the two I used an RCA to .125" conversion cord. After connecting the RCA outputs from my stereo to the Line In port on my sound card, I launched my recording software. I used a program called Sound Studio that I downloaded from www.felttip.com. It was relatively easy to use, but takes some getting used to. The thing I like about a program like Sound Studio is that it can easily remove pops, clicks, and hisses as you convert them to digital format. If you wish to research sound recording software visit www.cnet.com and search for Recording Software.

I followed one of the tips from Seth and cleaned the record as thoroughly as possible. The old dust and grunge can significantly lower the sound quality and possibly create unwanted noise. Another thing I did was to make sure that the input port I plugged into(Microphone or Line In) was activated in my sound properties. To check, I clicked on the speaker symbol located in the system tray on the right hand side of the task bar. In the resulting dialog box, I then put a check in the box of the port I had plugged the .125" jack into. Next I adjusted the recording levels so that the peaks are as close to 0dB as possible. Seth said that the general rule of thumb is that, all green on the recording meter means you will likely get lots of hiss and little sound, and all red means you will get some clipping and irritating sound quality.

Once the settings were in place I began recording. The music was recorded onto my hard drive as a .WAV file. When I was ready to burn the music to CD, I opened the .WAV file with my Easy CD creator software, selected the recording speed and chose the command to record the file to a CD. An important thing to remember is that a typical 40-minute LP will take up about 500MB of hard drive space and you might need another 500MB for temporary files. In order to be safe, figure on needing a total of about one gigabyte of extra hard drive space for your recording.

Next week I will discuss the recording process in more detail. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions feel free to email me at WebServercolumn@yahoo.com