How To Transfer Vinyl Records to Digital using audacity - no usb turntable required!

Don't waste your money on those awful plastic ion or AT turntables which are mediocre at best. Grab your vintage turntable, fix it up, put a good cartridge on it and use it through your stereo to transfer your vinyl to digital. Its not as hard as it looks. In this video, I show how to connect your turntable to your Tape Record output to the line input on your computer, set levels, test record, record, and export to file. This is only a brief tutorial, but you get the idea!

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• transfer
• vinyl
• to
• digital
• records
• mp3
• wav
• aiff
• ogg
• vorbis
• flac
• audacity
• audio

[wizzieG]

omg.. He is complaining about noise, but than he saves it as mp3...

Please don't use mp3. If your harddrive is big enough, use wav file format. With mp3 you bring in noise into the beautyfull quality of vinyl

[jpdylon]

@wizzieG You are partially correct. Using a lower bitrate will compromise dynamic range and frequency response, but won't bring noise into the recording. Lower quality bitrates below 160kb will give the illusion of noise because of the compression artifacts squeezing the high frequency detail into what we hear as a blob of noise. In most applications 320 is suitable for most listeners. There is also FLAC, apple lossless and of course the pure WAV. All is up to you. My video uses MP3 as example.

[UniPocalypse]

is there a way to play through and album and then cut and export the individual songs?

[jpdylon]

@UniPocalypse Yes. You highlight the section of the audio you want, cut, then paste it into a new project. Then export it to the desired format (mp3, AIFF, WAV, etc) from audacity.

[UniPocalypse]

@jpdylon thanks thats a huge help, but i seem to have another problem on my hands now. whenever i record anything from my turntable (and yes, i got one of those "awful plastic" ones) a LARGE part of the audio is ruined due to clipping. i figured out how to adjust the line in volume, but that only condenses the wavelength, and the clipping still exists. the output meter on audacity isn't working also and i believe that may be part of the problem. any thoughts on this?

[jpdylon]

@UniPocalypse If you are connecting the turntable through a preamp or receiver that has a phono input, make sure the turntable's internal preamp (if it has one) is turned off. Also, make sure that there are no extra gain or boost setting enabled as part of your sound card control panel or system preference settings. Often times there are boost / gain settings for extra mics. Also make sure you're in line-in and not mic in. If its USB direct, I'm a little stumped.

[theoryg]

Simply sensational. 

[SenorCajones]

To ANYONE who can't keep windows mac shit out of their commentaries...fuck you...just for being a twat. Good tute otherwise.

but as for me...too many problems with macs to justify their prettiness and your pettiness.

[albytarzia]

a very good and useful vid, thanks very much...btw, it's funny that you're using martin denny's version of "ruby" as an example; that whole album was a favorite of mine back in the '60s...

[sgtpepper1138]

That rug really ties the room together...... Nice vid btw.