Digitizing Music from Vinyl Records

I love music and have been collecting it since long before CD’s were invented. When I was a teenager and young adult, I was a professional musician and spent most of my discretionary income on record albums and 45 rmp singles. I have quite literally over one thousand recordings on vinyl (Analog). Many of them have just never been captured for sale on a digital format. Hence, the purpose of this blog. Please note, these are very basic instructions to help you get your music to your computer. Audacity software is quite complex and I am not an Audacity master. That being said, it is the best way I have found to inexpensively get my vinyl on to my computer. Without further ado, here are the steps I followed:

In order to convert Analog Vinyl to digital files you will need:

1. USB Turntable ( mine is Numark)
2. USB cable
3. Software to interface with the turntable (Audacity)
4. Patience
5. If your vinyl is in less then pristine condition, there are editing software available to help remove the ‘pops” and “hisses” including audacity and others.

Step I
Connect USB Turntable to a USB Port on your computer.

Step II
Load the Interface Software
Audacity is Freeware. There are version for Mac OS, Windows, and Linix/Unix. The Download is easy and quick. There is a new Beta Version from Windows 7 and good documentation about the new features on the website http://audacity.sourceforge.net/



Step III
Start The Audacity Program and your turntable and Record the song to your Computer. Press the red Record icon (circle) and put the stylus on your record. You will see the image of the wave as it is recording.


Step IV
Save your File, Open it and Edit it. Audacity has tons of editing function for changing pitch, speed (which I do as I record the songs fast and then slow them to the correct speed), Click removal, fade out. It is not as robust as a profession editing program but it still has a lot of features. All of the editing features are in the “effect” tab.

Step V
When you are finished editing, Audacity will allow you to save your song in either .mp3 or .wav format. I save mine in .wav to a 2 terabyte external drive so that I have a lossless copy for my archive. I then save a new copy as mp3 so that I can play it on my car stereo and ipod.

Excel Project

The Excel Project for Spring ISM3004 was an eye-opening, “ah-ha” moment for this “old dog”. The project and the lectures discussed a number of excel functions from basic to moderately advanced. I have been working with excel since the early 1990’s and yet, right after watching the lecture about the “Find” function, I became better at my job as a data professional.

I spend many hours of my professional life exporting very large quantities of data from Oracle Databases and evaluating it for user reported problems or data profiling. My tool of choice for this has always been Excel. Up until this class, I had used very basic techniques that got the job done but were very labor intensive. This week, I was evaluating database catalogs to determine if a particular piece of data was stored in any of about 50 database schemas. We use fairy consistent naming standards for our columns in most of our IT controlled Schemas, so I was able to use the “= Find” function to locate a particular naming standard “_nbr” and translate it to a constant that was easier to sort and evaluate. Needless to say, this reduced the number of columns that needed to be evaluated by about 90%. That one new technique saved me untold hours of tedium.

It seem that every lecture so far in this class has had a very positive impact on my professional life. I suspect that is because, once you have a method to get a job done, you rarely have the time or the inclination to look for a better way. It is the classic, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” axiom. I have a whole new mind set about that now. Thomas Edison used to walk up to his employees and say “There is a better way --- Find it” I plan on looking for that better way in all of the tools I use on a daily basis thanks to this lesson.

I have used pivot tables in a past career for writing reports. Presently, I perform those function with tools like Business Objects or Hyperion (Brio) as they can subscribe to the data without export (Oracle, DB2, SQLServer) but I think I may find some new uses for pivot tables in my daily work.