Best way to transfer albums

I have a friend that wants to digitize his LP collection.

Anyone have any experience with this?

I told him to start with the cheapest easiest way I could think of.

Download Audacity ,use a cable to link the headphone jack on his stereo and the mic input on his laptop.

Let's see how it works......

Use the line in, not microphone. The quality of modern onboard audio is not going to be an issue unless it's a really good turntable.

No line in on his laptop.

Soulcatcher668 said:

No line in on his laptop.

Click to expand...

It can often be switched into line in mode.

For optimum sound quality, do not use onboard line in ports. You need an external ADC (Analog to Digital Converter). This makes or breaks digitizing LPs. Tascam makes good ones. I cannot stress how important this device is for this procedure. Coming from personal experience, it makes a HUGE difference. There are also some onboard soundcards that do a decent job with this, but I'd go external.

Also, Audacity is simple and easy but it has a huge flaw. It is tricky to get it to record high resolution sources. For example, lets say you are trying to capture your analog source at a 24bit 192khz digital rate, which for initial digitizing is what it should be at. Audacity for some setups will not truly capture the 24 bit 192khz source. It will create the overhead in your file and metadata to appear as if you are capturing it at that rate, but the audio in fact is not reaching the higher resolution. There are workarounds to this, but I personally would use something different when it comes to hi-res audio.

Wavlab is good, Adobe Audition is better.

Hope he has a good record cleaning setup as well. This is very important otherwise get ready for some ticks and other crap.

The turntable is going to be the limiting factor unless it's a really good one.

NiHaoMike said:

The turntable is going to be the limiting factor unless it's a really good one.

Click to expand...

Yes and no. You are correct that really low end tables will kill the quality, no questions there. But if you have a properly setup midfi table, like a Technics SL1200 or a stock Thorens TD160, throw a good cartridge on there, make sure everything is tuned up appropriately throughout the entire system chain, you can get solid results.

Obviously not saying there isn't a difference between a real high end deck and not. Every piece of equipment in the system chain matters when it comes to analog equipment. But for digitizing you loose some of the elements that really set apart a great deck from a decent. Sorta like looking at a picture as opposed to being there in person.

Clean & undamaged records + properly setup turntable w/ good cartridge + good ADC + good capturing software is the ticket.

Good capturing software costs nothing. Just dumping the bits doesn't take much to do.
http://linux.die.net/man/1/arecord

Any decent sound card can do 90dB SNR easily, with many doing better than 100dB. You'll have a hard time trying to get 80dB SNR out of a record.