Convert Large LP Collection To MP3?
 

My father has thousands of vinyl LPs - classical, opera, musical, some popular, etc - from the 1950s to now.

Lots of it is NA in digital form.

I'd like to get it in MP3 form.

What is the simplest way for him to digitize his collection? He uses a PC. Is there a dingus he should connect between record player and PC? Or a combo record player-cd burner?

Here's the bigger dilemma. A lot of the cool in LPs of that era is the covers and the liner info. Knowing that this Shastakovich was performed by the Philadelphia Symphony under Ormandy and the musicians include blah blah - that is important. There is no way my dad will type in all that info. I might, but he lives 600 miles away.

What's a good strategy for this meta info? Have him xerox the covers and liners and send to me? Can I then OCR the xeroxes? Or have him photograph and email along w/ the mp3 files? Can I OCR the image files? Or ?

In iTunes, can I easily insert the cover art?

Ideas? This is a project I've wanted to do for a long time.

If you have the drive space leave them as AIFF's. Plenty of USB turntables out there.

The album art may already be out there, if not just scan it. In fact i-Tunes will check online for you.

Same with the meta-data, you may find it already available.

Have fun.

You'd either need a separate a/d converter or one of those USB turntables; sorry I have no specific hardware recs at the moment.

The metadata is the tough part. Cover art is easily scanned but getting the data into each file electronically will entail a whole bunch of typing, methinks.

In terms of format I agree with stomachmonkey that you should go first to a lossless format such as .wav or .flac (there are others) for optimum quality. From there you can compress (transcode) to .mp3 for use on mobile devices, as desired.

1st decision is the sound quality you want to achieve - low end = USB turntable
higher end = quality A>D convertor + quality turntable, arm & cartridge

talk to Ian re high end equipment; there is a site that sells quality used stuff... Audiogon?

think about cleaning each LP also

import of song titles for each track can be tedious

import of album cover art less tedious - I guess about 1/10th as tedious

easy to do in iTunes - select all songs on album; get the Info box to pop up; select the tab (Info or General or something) and in another -reduced- window find the art you want (say on Amazon) and just drag it over; done

Hope you have LOTS of time. I looked into converting all my old LP's...decided no way.

Yeah. Tedious describes the process. If you really want to preserve them Randy is bang on here. I wouldn't consider MP3s to be worth the effort but many may disagree due to the convenience & cost factor. I have some properly digitized 'LPs' & the results can be very good. But I have not & will not ever get around to do my pile. I would agree that cleaning is critical. Especially with classical music. A lot of metadata is out there via iTunes, freedb etc but you will probably have to scan a fair bit.

Ian

I did one song off one album with an A>D system and my old turn table. I don't think I'd care much about quality in order to simplify the process.

You just can't edit unless you end up transferring the music to a HD. Back to sq 1.

My dad has the quality turntable and line out on his stereo. I take it that simply using RCA jack to mic input plug is not going to be high quality. I'd need to get him a good RCA to USB adapter or something.

Being retired with nothing much to do but futz away on the computer, he has all the time in the world. Or so I think. He may see it differently.

if he's happy with the quality he gets now, then he just needs a quality A>D convertor - plug the turntable or pre-amp (depends) into that; plug a>D into the computer

set the iTunes or other program to the very highest quality it can use and futz away...

he will then need a good D > A to get the muzak back out...

I have an a-to-d converter and amp I will loan you (if I can find it) if you really want to do this. You need an amplifier and an a-d converter, since the output from a turntable is so low. I did this years ago with my vinyl. It is a tedious process. I would buy any record available on DVD instead of converting. Better sound and a LOT less work.

My son converts albums to MP3's for people to earn some extra $. He has a NuMark turntable and a scanner to scan in the liner notes and he save them ad PDF's and copies them to the appropriate folder on the CD/DVD that he burns them to. Very tedious work, but a good winter project...

Thanks all. I need to talk my dad into this. If successful, you may hear from me on specific how-to's. He seems to be more into simply accumulating the LPs than actually doing anything with them. People get weird as they age, I think.