Speaker Mode is set to 2 Speaker in the Main tab of the Santa Cruz Control Panel.

There are several steps to record audio from your stereo:

• Locating the right outputs and inputs
• Getting the right cables and adaptors
• Connecting your stereo to your computer
• Getting the right levels
• Recording

RCA jacks are always color coded in white and red, or black and red. Red is always the right channel.

Select one of the following RCA jacks, located on your stereo's receiver (the component that has the volume and tuning controls). Any of these are acceptable for sending signal to your PC:

If you have an 1/8 inch input on your computer's sound card, you need the following:

• A pair of RCA cables which look like this:
  
  
• A Y-adaptor: 2 RCA jacks to 1 1/8" stereo plug which look like this:
  
  

If you have a pair of 1/4 inch inputs on your computer's sound card, you need the following:

Click the Open Windows Mixer button at the bottom of the Recording Help dialog.

The Windows Mixer looks like this:

When you open the Windows Mixer it may be labeled Play Control or Recording Control. We want to see the Recording Controls.

To view the Recording Controls:

1. Click the Options menu and select Properties.
2. The Properties dialog appears.
   
   
3. In the Adjust Volume For section of the Properties dialog, select the Recording radio button.
4. In the Show the Following Volume Controls section, the Line-in and Microphone options should be checked. If they are not, check them.
5. Click OK.
6. The Recording Controls now appear in the Windows Mixer.
7. Check the input you want to use, either Line In or Microphone.

Selecting an input:

Ripping Vinyl to CD

By Nick44 (call me Nick)

OK, if you have read the previous article, you should have everything connected up and you should be familiar with the Line In source on your recording panel. Now you should be ready to rip some tunes from your vinyl, and make a CD.

The general sequence is going to be as follows. First, you have to get that music or whatever to your hard drive (we’ll call that recording). Second, you have to process it to get an acceptable audio quality and get the tracks ready for the CD (we’ll call that processing). Third, you have to actually make the CD (we’ll call that burning).

There are a number of programs that claim to do this all with "one touch". For example, Roxio Easy CD has an application called Audio Central. I’m not going to discuss these "one touch" applications because (a) if you have them, you can read the manual, and (b) I don’t think they work very well.

I’m going to cover processing at a very basic level. Audio restoration is really an "art" rather than a computer technology, and it is dependent on the application you use, the significance of your source, and how much time you want to spend learning to do it. If this arouses your interest, the links and discussions at the end of the article will give you plenty of food for thought.

As a general observation, if the vinyl was in reasonably good shape to begin with, you can get some pretty good sounds with only minimal processing.

Also, you’ll notice I keep emphasizing recording from "vinyl". This is shorthand for LPs and 45s made from about 1950 on. Earlier recordings, especially old 78rpm records, are a whole topic unto themselves.

Recording

There are three steps involved here: connecting the source, setting a level, transferring to disk.

Connecting the source

The general principles of connecting an audio source to a PC were covered in the previous article. Just a few specifics that pertain to vinyl, and we are on our way.

Obviously, to record from vinyl, you are going to need a turntable. A turntable basically consists of a platter that rotates, an arm, and a cartridge at the business end of the arm. The cartridge holds the stylus, a needle-like device that is the actual contact with the record on the platter. The stylus is moved by the grooves in the record, and the cartridge converts that movement to electrical signals.

Turntables like this one will run at 33 RPM or 45 RPM (RPM is shorthand for "revolutions per minute".) Those are the only speeds we are going to need for our purposes. This turntable model comes with a cartridge and stylus. Others do not come with cartridge and you have to purchase one separately. Just make sure you have all the pieces in place before you start. For LPs and 45s, you will use a microgroove stylus and a magnetic cartridge.

Older turntables often had more speeds (like 78 RPM and 16 ½ RPM) and even came with multiple cartridges or styluses. If you have or can get one of these, you can certainly use it.

If you are using a receiver, follow the previous article for the connections to your PC. If you are using a stand-alone preamp or a turntable with a built-in preamp, you may connect the outputs directly to your PC - you don’t need to go thorough a receiver if you don’t want to. However, many people prefer to use a receiver as a handy control panel even when it isn’t strictly required.

Everything connected OK?

Now you are ready to set your recording level.

Setting a level

The single meter window in Figure 4 is very simple because there is only one thing to look at. All we need to pay attention to is the level itself, which in this particular application is labeled "VU meter". Again, don’t fret about what that means here because your application may use completely different labels.

Set the actual LP or 45 that you want to record from on the turntable and start it spinning. Find what you think will be the loudest passage and drop the arm there. Watch the part of the window labeled Rec Level or VU Meter (or whatever label your application uses). Notice the level readings bouncing up and down. Adjust the level to slightly below full scale (for application windows similar to Figure 1, that would be between –2 dB and –3 dB; for application windows similar to Figure 2, that would be the line labeled ‘Optimal’)

You say you don’t how to adjust the level? Please see the previous article.

Once you have the level set, replace the turntable tone arm at the beginning of the record.

Transferring to the Hard Drive

This is the easiest step, because you’ve already launched your recorder application and set the level.

Start the actual recorder (you usually have a very visible button in your application which is labeled Record – that’s the one to click). Now lower the arm to the record. Notice that we start the recording program before we start the source. This is very important. Some recording programs have a threshold setting so you don’t get a lot of silent time at the beginning. Or we can remove the unnecessary silence later.

That’s about it. But don’t go off and walk the dog at this point. You should monitor what is going on. You want to monitor both the sound and the level. You monitor the sound for particularly noisy spots or bad audio that you may want to look at later during processing. You monitor the level to make sure you don’t exceed the 0 dB (or red) level. One or two very short exceeds is not a problem, but anything significant means you will have noticeable clipping in the recording. This makes for really bad audio on the CD. The only solution is to stop the recording, reset the level, and restart the recording.

When the side is finished, turn off the recorder. Most applications store the recorded result in a temporary location and you have to permanently save it at the end. So when the recording is done, save it to a file with a descriptive name.

If everything went well, you should now have a WAV file of one side of the LP, approximately 300 MB in size. Do the same thing with the other side of the LP (or with each 45)

Notice that I haven’t mentioned anything about tracks yet. That’s because the preferred method is to record one entire side of an LP, and then insert the track markers and/or track splits during processing. Most 45s consist of one track, so the issue doesn’t come up.

Notice also that I haven’t said anything about compressing, or any kind of recording except making a WAV file. There are programs that will record and compress at the same time, but that is a whole other topic.

Processing

As I mentioned, I’m not going into any great detail about this. In fact, you may not want to clean up the sound at all. You may be perfectly satisfied with the recording as it comes off the vinyl. In that case, simply skip the first part of this step and go directly to Splitting into tracks.

Cleaning up the sound

There are quite a few applications that will do the job, and you can find out what they are in the references. Whichever application (or applications) that you use, make sure you have an impulse noise filter (sometimes called a declicker) to remove clicks and pops, a high pass filter to remove rumble, and finally a low pass filter or equivalent to remove any light surface noise. Also, make sure you can normalize a WAV file.

First, though, save the original WAV files before you do any processing on them. Best would be to make a data CD containing whatever makes up the total project, such as the two original WAV files that represent both sides of an LP. Put that data CD away in a safe place. If you really mess up for any reason, you can simply restart without going through the whole recording routine again.

Now let’s begin to process the audio. A typical application will look something like Figure 5.

  Figure 5. Typical Audio Editor

Notice the two windows in the editor. The top window is the source, and the bottom is the destination (blank in this view). The general approach is to listen to the source and apply a particular filter to it, which then fills the destination window with the result. Then listen to the destination to decide if the sound is clean and has not lost any significant audio. With LPs and 45s that are in reasonably good shape and are being played back on good equipment, you can often get a pretty decent result using only the three simple filters mentioned above. There are a lot of other filters that may be used to do a premium job, but these three will often be sufficient.

After cleaning up the audio, the sound will sometimes be a bit dull. This could be due to the filtering, or to a deficiency in the original record. To do a premium job, restorers often apply some special "sweetening" effects at this point to improve the sound; the better audio editors include quite a few of them to choose from. But you can get by without it.

A final consideration - which may or may not apply - is to convert a one-channel ("mono") file into a two-channel ("stereo") file. You would do this if your original source was in mono format and you recorded it as a single channel. Conversion is then necessary because an audio CD must have two channels. Many CD burning programs, and even some recording programs, can do this conversion automatically. So it’s not strictly necessary in many cases. But you may want to control how it is done, so this is the place to do it.

After cleaning up the sound, it’s often necessary to normalize the file. This is something that you really can’t get around. Normalization will adjust the volume level of the file so that it is maximized for CD audio. Otherwise, you may find the resulting CD plays at too low a volume. As with the one-channel to two-channel conversion, some CD burning programs will do this for you automatically. Just as before, it’s a question of how much control you want to keep on the finished product.

The final thing I want to mention is marking the file into tracks and getting the tracks ready for a CD.

Splitting the file into tracks and other finishing touches

There are a number of applications that will automatically "split" a WAV file into tracks. Some CD burning programs include a splitting function. Most general-purpose editors come with some sort of splitter as well. There are standalone programs, too. I’m not going to tell you which one to use. But I want to note some important considerations for any application that you may look at.

Run your splitting application and make whatever adjustments are required (adding or removing markers). If your application ‘quantizes’ as a separate step, don’t forget to do it!

Burning the CD

This is the fun part, but it can also cause problems. You can use any application that will make an audio CD. But whichever one you use, be sure that you are actually making an audio CD. Different programs use different terminology. For example, Roxio Easy CD calls this a "Music Project".

Set up your program to record Disk at Once (DAO). Set the burning speed to whatever is optimal for your particular system. Now select the tracks in the order that they appear on the LP (or change the order if you want).

Remember to convert to stereo and check off the normalize function if you are doing those in the burner application.

Start the burn and you’re done!

If you did things correctly, you will not get any gaps between the CD tracks or any extraneous noise at the beginning of your tracks. If you do get them, make sure that you are in DAO mode, and that you quantized the tracks.

And have fun!

Extra added feature – Burning from cassettes

Ripping and burning from a cassette is essentially the same as from vinyl. Obviously, you will need a cassette deck (see figure 7). The main differences are (1) a cassette deck is a high level device and doesn’t need a preamp, and (2) most cassettes use some form of proprietary noise reduction such as Dolby that has to be applied within the deck.

For Further Information, see the following sources.

http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=dim_audio&message.id=31845

http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=dim_audio&message.id=32251

http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=dim_audio&message.id=32775

http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=dim_audio&message.id=30971

http://www.pcabusers.net/vinyllp/vinyllp.htm

http://www.delback.co.uk/lp-cdr.htm