Summary of converting LP's to CD's with PC's (long)

[Bobb Menk]

I actually posted my question about converting old LP's to audio CD's 
using a sound card and a PC to two separate discussions.  One devoted  (more 
or less) to librarians and their use of technologies and the web, the 
other composed of scientists, engineers and just plain folks who used 
to work for a prominent acoustical engineering & research company and 
like to keep in touch.

My thanks to all in both groups who've contributed. 

I had not anticipated generating as much discussion as I did and I
have had multiple requests from members of both groups for a summary. 

For  myself, we'll have to see if I get a tax refund before I take 
the plunge ;>.

Here's the short summary: 

It can be done.  The key requirements are: a good cd-writeable drive 
- either EIDE or SCSI will work, (Ricoh, HP & Yamaha models all 
receiving praise); a large hard drive (2gb-4gb) to store and edit the 
audio files; software to filter out noise before writing to the CD 
(Cool Edit, Spin Doctor, Sound Forge all recommended by users), the 
PC must be dedicated to this task when actually writing to CD,  
patience to edit the sound to a quality level acceptable to you.

Some recommended resources include:
Newsgroups: comp.publish.cdrom.hardware and alt.comp.periphs.cdr 
Magazine Article:  Source: Stereo Review, Mar98, Vol. 63 Issue 3, 
p22, 3p, 2c, by, Pohlmann, Ken C.

A word of warning from a music librarian who shares concerns for 
anyone with responsibilities in this area that are beyond the merely 
personal:

"I'd be careful doing this - while you get adequate quality, you 
won't get great quality.  We use them for archival work and to make 
copies of student recitals.  We don't use a CD recorder on a PC, 
though - we use a professional model.  You can probably get an idea 
of the difference in quality from the difference in price - our  
professional model runs for over $3,000.  The quality of your sound 
card will make a big difference - professional quality models are 
available, but they are also more expensive than your basic  
SoundBlaster.  I don't know about the software concerns, but my guess 
is that there is also a wide range of quality out there."

The long summary is below for those with greater interest.   I have 
extracted and quoted the gist of what various people have said and 
left all contributors in graceful anonymity.  Should anyone wish to 
speak further with someone who contributed a specific bit of 
experience or advice, please contact me and I will try to connect the 
interested  parties.

Quite a number of people had varying levels of experience actually 
doing this. Here's what they have to say:
     
"I have an HP 7110E parallel port unit - attached to the parallel 
port standing the computer and the printer, and I bought the Adaptec 
CD Creator deluxe edition for the "Spin Doctor" software for creating 
Audio CDs.  I have been using it on a Dell P166 laptop with 64MB 
memory and lots of hard disk space free.  I either read in the .wav 
files onto my hard drive or read the audio CD with my CD-R drive onto 
my hard drive as .wav files.  This stuff takes up a lot of space:  
approximately 10Mbytes/minute.  So for a 74 minute CD you need close 
to a Gigabyte of free disk space.  To make the CD look professional, 
you should get a CD label maker which is basically a set of circular 
labels, a program to write them, and a funny looking round donut
shaped device called a "stomper" that presses the label onto the CD 
properly aligned."

"Yamaha and H-P have reliable CD-R drives for $500 or so that ship 
with CD Writer Pro or similar serviceable software; I've heard (and 
told) discouraging stories about many other drives.   SoundBlaster 32 
or better sound cards do fine at capturing your LPs, but cleaning 
them up before outputting to CD-R is another story.  You can clean up 
major scratches, pops and clicks manually with any such software, 
e.g., what came with your sound card.  However, many old LPs have 
more nasty deteriorations, like fuzziness caused by stylus scrubbing. 
 For this I use SoundForge; there's a plug-in for the "real" version 
(not the freeware LT version) that specifically deals with several 
aspects of this problem."

"There are a lot of differences between CD-R units.  The one that I 
have (HP 7110) is much better in this regard than others I have heard 
of.  And, the issue of difficulty writing only occurs with writing 
audio CDs -- not data file CDs.  I used my CD-R drive for both 
purposes.  The HP unit comes with a beautiful program that integrates 
the CD-R drive into the Windows 95 file system...  It even has some 
logic that allows you to overwrite a file, but since this is write  
once technology it must be marking the old file unavailable and 
writing a fresh copy taking up additional space. I have primarily 
used HP write once CDs that I can get these days at CompUSA for $1/CD 
(with a mailin rebate)."

"(n.b. This info culled from personal experience and following the 
newsgroups listed above) First, any decent audio adapter should be 
able to do a good job on the audio recording itself: it's the 
software that's crucial, and there I've noticed no consensus about 
which product is really best and most usable.  I want something 
that'll let me record an entire two sides of a 33; clean the sound of
pops, scratches, and hiss; then cleanly divide it into cuts and 
annotate the resulting CD.  I guess 800MB of hard disk space for the 
original recording and another two times that for editing space and 
the final audio CD image before burning, so a 4GB AV-qualified disk 
should be plenty.  But no one is entirely satisfied with any of the  
available CD recording hardware, so I've concluded for the moment 
that the CD recorders aren't ready for prime time yet, where "prime 
time" is defined as "use by people who aren't obsessed with CD 
recorders but just want to make CDs".  Of course, this also does 
relate to the software.  CPU power: based on what I've seen, a 100MHz
Pentium with 16MB RAM should be plenty for the recording steps: it's 
the reliability of the hard disk and the CD recorder that are crucial 
in cutting the CD, not CPU power.  If you're processing the recording 
on hard disk (cleanup, etc.) naturally any additional CPU power and 
memory will make your life easier."

"I have done some research into using CD-R.  Most of my sources said 
that they operate in a "continuos write" mode.  That is, once you set 
everything up, it writes.  There had better not be any interruptions. 
 Not even a millisecond.  So, if you decide to print that label or 
check your Email, the CD is toast."

"I just got a Ricoh 6200 CD-RW just before Christmas and it's 
terrific. I've got CD's everywhere now! Got it hooked up to my 
Buslogic SCSI controller and it worked great right out of the box.
I'm using a P166 with 32MB of ram under Win95.  I've got my tape 
player hooked into my Soundblaster 32 soundcard and have recorded 
several cassettes with very good results. It's my understanding that 
you don't need a fancy soundcard at all for LP's, in fact the lowly  
Ensonique is the recommended card. LP's and cassettes are saved as 
wav files on the hard drive then converted and written to tracks on 
the CD. "Cool-edit" is good software for recording and editing wav 
files but there are several other sound editing programs available. 
"Spin Doctor" is available with Adaptec's CD Creator Deluxe software 
and is often recommended for taking out the hisses, scratches, highs, 
and lows of LP's. LP's require a bit more effort that other input  
forms but judging by the discussion it's not too bad and worth the 
effort."

"Most even 'adequate' sound cards will do 44Kb "CD quality" sampling, 
but you might be willing to accept something lesser if your disks 
aren't all that good...  Certainly a $75 Sound Blaster will do it all 
just fine. A friend  also recommended "Cool Edit Pro" 
[www.syntrillium.com].  It is about a hundred bucks.  With it you can 
de-click the stuff and also clean up the noise.  It is a big job, but 
apparently does a pretty good job."

Another recommendation was the use of a "mixing console to plug the 
turntable into, which, in turn plugs into the computer input.  You'll 
need a fast processor, large speedy hard-drive (those audio files are 
huge and slow read/write hardware leads to "blips" on the audio) for 
the LP "data", and preferably a separate drive for the software to 
process, manipulate, and drive the recording process onto the 
CD-recorder. We have a SCSI setup for two physical hard-drives on a
Gateway Pentium 125 system.  (Sound Forge is the software we use)"


Bobb Menk, Internet Librarian, Lane Memorial Library
Hampton, NH 03842  603-926-3368
bmenk at hampton.lib.nh.us