Last month in this magazine, you might have seen a helpful article about how to transfer vinyl records to CD via computer, using the Linux operating system. A couple of readers wrote in to ask, in effect, "Thanks for the advice. Now what in the hell is a Linux operating system?"
With all due respect to Linus Torvald's esoteric operating system, it's PC owners who are most likely to try such a stunt. But in an age when a handful of MP3s can become a CD in just a few clicks of the mouse, some users are intimidated by the prospect of dragging their vintage vinyl kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
They shouldn't be, because it's an easy and worthwhile process. We'll gloss over some of the obvious basics in the process: Clean your records before bothering to transfer them, use a decent turntable with a fairly new stylus, and so on. What you'll want to concentrate on is getting the sounds onto your hard drive and working with them from there.
You'll want to use stereo patch cords to connect your turntable to an amplifier or receiver, and from there, the signal should be fed into the line input of your PC's sound card. Plan on a trip to your local electronics store once you've determined what kinds of wires and adapters you'll need.
The Sound Recorder utility that comes with Windows isn't up to a job like this because it records to RAM (rather than directly to the hard disk), writing the results to your hard disk only when you're done recording. There are all kinds of shareware applications that will write audio signals directly to the hard disk. Search any shareware site and do some shopping for the most versatile recorders.
(Not to give short shrift to the many fine recording apps out there, but the cream of the crop among many users is Syntrillium's Cool Edit line. Cool Edit Pro and Cool Edit 2000 compose a thorough line of tools needed to convert sounds from any source to CD or to MP3 files.)
Once you've used the recorder to establish a line level signal, it needs to be digitized (usually into a .WAV file) and recorded onto the hard disk. For 40 minutes of music, you'll need about 500MB of space, and perhaps another 500MB for temporary files.
Another technical issue you'll want to check on is whether your sound card can handle the job of creating a file big enough to hold a good-quality sound recording. Most sound cards are capable of processing a 44.1KHz, 16-bit stereo signal, so there's probably not a great need to upgrade your sound card, given the sonic limitations of vinyl. If you need to buy a sound card, choose carefully. Many sound cards are meant for games or other apps, and can cost up to $200.
Once the recording is on your hard disk, you can devote about as much energy as you want to cleaning up your recording. Some listeners are more persnickety than others about surface noise, but be careful: Noise-reduction units use detection-and-repair algorithms that have a tendency to rob recordings of certain frequencies essential to the music, so use such systems sparingly.
Another thing to consider is splitting tracks. As far as your computer is concerned, the album you've just recorded consists of one long song. Some CD-burning applications will automatically create a new track whenever it senses three or more seconds of silence, but this method is iffy--how often is there only dead silence on an old record? A better bet is to split tracks manually by putting index marks in the dead spaces between songs, which is relatively easy with most recording programs.
Those are just some of the basics. The Internet is loaded with sites that discuss the finer points of this process, so do some research. From there, if you have a CD-burning program, it should be one-click city. Again, there are myriad ways to make the process more complicated, but if your sole mission is to get that irreplaceable LP into a form that can be played in your car, the process has never been simpler.
