[mdlug] Vinyl to digital

[Ingles, Raymond]

 Well, I took a vacation day yesterday. We're making room for a new baby,
so we reorganized the basement storage, and, well, the turntable was dug
out, and...

 I was mostly successful in digitizing things. My main problem... I couldn't
capture properly. My sound card is an SB Live Value, and I've done it before,
but this time it gave me fits. I played with alsamixer, the Gnome mixer, etc.
While I could *hear* a stereo signal through the computer speakers and/or
headphones, I could only capture one channel. When I played with the mixer,
there were two stereo capture entries - but one appeared to cover the left
channel, and one got the right. Audacity only recorded the 'left' one.
Anyone run into that before?

 I had another machine with the same sound card that's (for the moment)
running Windows, and was able to capture stereo files. Not too happy about
that - some way or another I've got to get Linux to capture properly. It
worked a couple months back for tapes, why is it a problem now?

 Now, for some technical info. The signal came straight from the turntable
with no preamp, so it was very quiet and didn't have the RIAA equalization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization) applied to it. But, a bit
of processing in Audacity fixed that. (Amplify by 48db, then Effects ->
Equalize -> RIAA.) I captured at 48KHz (the native freq of the SBLive) and
they sound all right. Using "lame --preset standard" generated some good
mp3 files, and mp3gain got the volume right.

 One of them was pretty degraded, and I tried applying Gramofile to it,
but it didn't make much difference. BTW, Gramofile only accepts 44.1KHz
files; to resample the 48KHz files, I used:

 sox infile.wav -r 44100 resample -ql outfile.wav

 But like I said, I didn't really notice much difference, at least with
the default Gramofile settings. The results are acceptable to my
non-audiophile ears. And an SD card is much easier to carry around than
an LP. :->

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                        (313) 227-2317

 Anyone else remember when we were promised that music would get
 cheaper because CDs cost so much less to produce than cassettes?
    Harry Potter (Full Screen) DVD (over 9GB of data) - $16
   Harry Potter Soundtrack CD (less than 0.7GB of data) - $14
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