Optimizing Audacity for Ripping Vinyl

[markiteight]

Hi all,

I searched the forums and only came up with a few bits and pieces, but I'm wondering if anyone has spent time coming up with the most musical combination of settings for analog to digital conversion in Audacity. This will be my first attempt at ripping from an analog source and I'm very curious to hear the results.

I have several albums that are near and dear to me that unfortunately I possess only in poorly ripped digital files from the early days of .mp3. I recently discovered vinyl pressings of a couple of these albums that I thought were only available on CD or cassette, and there are copies on their way to me now. I'm curious to see how an analog rip from a decent LP12 source stacks up to a 20 year old .mp3 rip of a beat up CD that skips on the last two tracks.

If no one has yet explored optimizing Audacity I'd be willing to spend some time messing with it, with help from you via the playground thread, but I suspect hardware variations may affect the results from one user to another.

Thanks!

[ChrBea]

Hi,
I saw in the Linn-forums that some people seem to use other programs as well to digitize vinyl records. I have no experience in this domain, as I am only using audacity to create background music for presentations, where a single track is needed. But you might check this topic on the other forums:
http://forums.linn.co.uk/bb/showthread. ... #pid407420

Regards,
Christian

[markiteight]

Thanks, Christian. Some good information there. I just assumed Audacity was the program of choice since that seems to be what everyone here is using. The prospect that there's a potentially better program out there complicates matters exponentially.