Work in progress.

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.

This machine is probably fast enough for most processing, and has 256 MB of ram.

I also have an Athlon 1800+ XP, with 512 MB of ram, running Gentoo linux. This is what I'm doing most of my processing under, if I can at all help it.

First Attempt

I used DartPro? under Win98 to record the vinyl. I made two wav files, one for each side of the vinyl. I used DartPro? because trogs suggested it as a useful tool, and I thought it might do all of my processing for me very easily. If it will, I couldn't work out how in the 10 minutes I spent playing with it (mainly, I couldn't get it to play any wave files, so it was very hard to tell how well its effects were working).

I had seen an article on gramofile on LinuxJournal or SlashDot or somewhere, and thought I'd give it a try. It's located at http://panic.et.tudelft.nl/costar/gramofile/. One thing I noticed - it's had no work done in over two years!. There is actually a fork of the project at http://www.schou.dk/linux/gramofile/ which has advanced it somewhat, although the author of the fork calls it a hostile takeover, apparently in complete ignorance of how OSS projects work.

Using gramofile 1.6 (the 'old' version) was pretty easy. It locates track boundaries, separates the input .wav into tracks, and then performs some click reduction on it. The track finding algorithm was a bitch enthusiastic, and the click reduction was ok but there was still a large amount of noise.

So, I tried using audacity, which also featured in an article I read recently. Despite some UI problems (you cant skip to an arbitrary point in a .wav while its playing, you have to stop, wait a bit, click where you want the cursor to go to, then press play again) it seemed ok. It provides noise reduction and so on, but most of its effects were more focussed on 'effects' (wahwah, etc) rather than cleaning up old vinyl recordings.

I also had a play with DartPros? cleanup functions. It has a wide range of predefined tools - DeHiss?, DeClick?, DeNoise?, DeHum? and so on, and allows you to build up a custom filter using mixtures of these filters.

Both Audacity and DartPro? allowed me to amplify the tracks, which was needed as the output from my turntable was not amplified, and I dont have access to an external amplifier/eq unit.

I wrote a CD with my freshly cleaned and split tracks. Well, I wrote 2 coasters under linux (never authored an audio CD under linux before, I must be missing something like padding or reversing audio bits or something). I copied the tracks to the windows box, and wrote them to CD using Nero, at 52x. The resulting CD sounded ok, but the noise got progressively worse as the CD played (ie, later tracks sounded awful). Does anyone know if writing audio cds at high speed is a BadThing? ?

Second attempt:

Found some more information at http://www.xena.uklinux.net/Linux/audio.html. This guy started using gramofile, and then switched to using gwc, the Gnome Wave Cleaner. I'm installing this right now, as well as snd and sox, which both claim to be good tools

(Still going)