What the FLAC???

This is getting exciting. After a lot of trial and error, I have settled upon the rather quaint open source audio editing software, Audacity, to capture and encode selected vinyl LPs from my distant past. (See Let The Conversion Begin.) I am resurrecting my mid-70s-era Technics SL-1300 turntable with its Grado cartridge (can't recall the model, but it finally replaced a succession of Pickerings and Ortofons and others), hooked to an old 1Ghz AMD processor Windows 2000 box via an early Terratec USB 1.0 phono preamp. Nothing very audiophiliac, but it does the job fairly well. (Way, way better than trying to capture a stream via soundcard.)

Unfortunately, some of my records are not in the best of condition. Once they were stored for a few years in a shed in the California desert, with its temperature extremes, and of course some scratches, clicks and pops surface, too. Everything is dusty, and at least requires a rigorous cleaning first.

The Win2K box uses the 1.2.6 stable release of Audacity, but the capture -- just to get the assembly line in optimal motion -- gets moved to an Ubuntu Linux machine running a 1.3 beta of Audacity for editing, as its features are a distinct improvement from the earlier version and it seems quite stable under Linux (certainly better than with Win).

I do find Audacity to be strange, but once you get the hang of it, all seems to turn out well. I get the impression that it was designed by someone in a bubble, removed from the user conventions that the rest of us expect. I keep wanting to right-click for context menus and the like, but no way. Nothing seems particularly intuitive (granted that "intuitive" really just means that which corresponds to what we have learned along the way). A few behaviors are annoying, but I am going to give myself a little more time to get a better grip before complaining too much. Overall, Audacity seems to be a powerful and highly useful piece of work that makes a great contribution to the open source community. Oh, yes, I am running it on my MacBook as well.

Now the bad news here is that capturing the vinyl sounds is a realtime process, and it seems to take about two hours minimum to complete the loop on a single LP. Most run about 40-50 minutes of playing time -- sometimes requiring restarts. Then Audacity takes a while, minimally finding the edit points (I generally capture a full side in one take, then find the start-stop points, and do a batch export, automatically creating individual tracks). I first export to FLAC for my lossless digital library, then to 320 bitrate MP3s for iPod use. And I might re-create an audio CD from the original ripped WAVs for use in the car stereo and wherever standard CDDA audio disks might be needed. This doesn't count any time removing unwanted noise or making other tweaks -- but I really do try to avoid doing any post-processing of the capture if at all possible, as it almost always has a detrimental effect on sound quality. So I live with some clicks and pops; sometimes they seem to add a nostalgic sense of authenticity! At any rate, I have narrowed my vinyl shelves down to no more than about 300 I want to digitize, but it will take forever at my experienced rate of no more than one or two a day (I have to work at a day job, you know) -- so I am looking to grab the 50 or so most rare or most valued. A lot of this stuff is available on CD now, but we are in a deep recession, after all.

I also see that a some of these albums are now available on super-quality 180g flat virgin vinyl, but would require a substantial outlay for truly good equipment for playback as well. Who knows what the future might hold? In the meantime, we can probably look forward to a continuing process of digital conversion to the Next Best Thing.