[mdlug] Vinyl to digital

[Mike]

Ingles, Raymond wrote:
>
>  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

What sort of outputs does your record player have?  My old turntables only
had RCA out (and of course, my SB Live! didn't have any sort of RCA input
on them).  Did you convert the RCA -> stereo plug?

Mike