Forward Into The Past

Some music is timeless. My son – he’s 17 now – likes the Beatles. No matter that the band broke up when I was in middle school! Well, as it turns out we’ve got quite a few Beatles LPs (er, vinyl records, those plastic things with the grooves that played music for us old farts) in our collection down in the basement. It was time to do some conversion and put this stuff on his iPod.

I started to research those USB turntables that promise to quickly and easily turn LPs into MP3s and found them lacking. Well, at least those in the range I was willing to spend. Frankly, the hardware I was finding sported specs that kinda sucked, mostly because of the included cartridge.

LP Digitizing Workstation — My basement LP digitizing workstation, Ethernet cable dangling from the floor joists above. That's the back of my furnace in the background and the handle of a 1 KW floodlight leaning against the desk. Also visible is a Discwasher kit to the left of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour LP. Bought new for 99 cents during the summer between grammar school and middle school, that was the very first record I ever bought.

I still have an old (but still kinda nice) turntable. Sony, Decent magnetic cartridge, linear-tracking, not too bad. I even have an Onkyo receiver that has a built-in phono pre-amp. That’s a bit of a rarity in receivers nowadays, as the need for one has pretty much gone away. I hauled out the gear and did some testing as I pondered the reality that was sinking into my head…

Analog music – turntables and vinyl records – have all but gone away. Some DJs still use them for mixing stuff but even that’s largely going away, leaving only the quote-audiophiles-unquote. And it’s a given that whenever a market targets a group labeled with some word that ends in phile you can add a zero or two to the price on any related gear. Wow.

I found my old audio gear to be in perfect working order, a testament to decent care while in storage. On to the computer. From parts, I thew together something to handle the digitizing chore: A 1 GHz Celeron box; all of 256 MB RAM; a 250 GB hard drive; Soundblaster PCI 512 card; Windows XP; an ancient program, CDWAV, I think it came with an ancient version of Cakewalk Pyro.Â Yeah, that ought to do it.

The setup makes uncompressed WAV files: PCM, 2 16-bit channels, sampled at 44,100 Hz. I pull the files up to my desktop and use Nero to correct out the clicks and pops, separate the tracks and burn a standard audio CD. Then use iTunes to import the CD to MP3. The intermediate CD saves the analog-to-digital and cleanup work, the most labor-intensive part of the process. The CDs, BTW, are in most cases good enough to allow iTunes (Gracenote, actually) to figure out the album/song titles.

My digital library is now experiencing steady growth.