As a Christmas present, I have decided to convert some my of parents vinyls to CD. In doing so, I hope to remove some of the hiss and clicks you get on old vinyls, and also make sure the contents are preserved - they were either vinyl-only recordings (Tararua College choir, 1961) or unavailable in any other medium these days. 

  

 I'll add to this wiki as I go, so excuse the journal-like nature. When I've finished I'll tidy it up, or let a WikiGnome do it for me :) 

  

  

 !! Hardware used: 

  

 I have a Celeron-1300, running Windows 98 (wait a bit...), which has an SB Audidy 2 Platinum eX. As far as I know, there aren't decent drivers for the Audigy under linux, hence staying under Windows 98. That said, I'm not using it very much - it has RCA inputs on its external unit, which means I can plug my turntable directly in. 

  

 Having written this attempt to CD, it seems pretty good. I don't have the turntable hooked up to the stereo to compare the quality, but there are no pops, very little crackle. There is some residual noise still, and the gain is still too low, which makes the noise somewhat worse. When I amplified it before processing, it was amplified to the highest gain possible without clipping - however that was based (I think) on the highest amplitude seen, which was any number of the pops that occured there were about 10 - 15 times louder than the rest of the track. I'm not sure if this will improve the effect of the noise reduction algorithms, or if it will screw things up totally, but its probably worth a shot. 

  

 Selecting a better noise sample may also help, although I suspect its about as good as I can get. I'll move onto the next vinyl for now, which I know is in worse condition in some ways (at least one scratch bad enough to cause the needle to get stuck), but may have better properties overall. And the other thing to do is to try an external amplifer/equaliser unit, although I only have the stereo the turntable is connected to, which isn't overly great. I'm open to offers :)