[Web4lib] Where to invest in music collection.

[John Fereira]

Avrum Shepard wrote:
> It's really more complicated than that. You have to
> first clean the surface of the lp's, a fairly long and
> involved process. Do you have a record cleaning
> machine? They cost between $500 and $2,000. 

Your kidding right?  I've got about 1000 lp's in my attic that I used 
nothing but a "Discwasher" (I paid about $20 for it and used a 
alcohol-water mix as a cleaning solution) for many years.  Of course, I 
was always careful handling my lps and cleaned them before playing so 
they never got very dirty.

> Then
> there's the drying time. And you have to be careful
> not to scratch the orginals. Then you record. Do you
> have the equipment to take the analog signal and make
> it digital? You spend a few minutes for each lp to
> actually do the capture. 
A few minutes?  As far as I know there isn't anything available that 
will record an lp faster than it would normally be played (33rpm) and 
most lps run about 25 minutes a side.
> Then you usually have to
> clean up the sound with some kind of audio processor
> on a computer. Those little scratches, pops, and
> clicks were ok on the lp's but really irritating on a
> cd. 
I found an freeware tool awhile back that'll do that and it seemed to 
work pretty well. 
> Then you separate the tracks for the cd. This is
> not done for you by the record process. Then you
> record your cleaned up separated audio tracks to cd.
> I've done a little bit of this and there's not much
> help in how to do it. 
My father-in-law bought this device awhile back that is essentially a 
record player with a built in CD recorder. It automatically detects 
separate tracks and pauses the recording process when a side of the 
record completes.  After the tracks are written, the track information 
can be entered and then finalized so the artist and song titles can be 
"recorded" as well. 
> I would record only the
> out-of-print and worthwhile lps and get cd's for the
> rest that you want to replace. 
Aren't pretty much all lps out of print, at least in that medium?  I 
have quite a few lps that were never put on cd commercially.  In some 
cases, I've only seen one copy as an lp (the one I bought) and I also 
have quite a few "imports" for which the commercial CD replacement is 
much more expensive than a domestic (US) CD.  In one case, a recording 
that I paid $8 for would cost me $29 to replace if I bought the 
commercial CD.