Tom & Nan Dot Com

I’ve gone to the dark side… Partly gone to the dark side anyway. I went out today and bought a Mac mini.  Yes, I agree with Nan that I didn’t NEED it, but I wanted it so I could learn all about Mac’s. I still have the Windows 7 64bit beast and I won’t be giving it up any time soon, All of our pictures, my development tools, and my music is on it.

The Mac mini entry level system has an Intel Core i5 running at 2.3 GHz and 2GB of 1333 RAM. FOr the non-geekers out there it’s kind of on the slow side if it were a Windows PC… BUT, I’m told the Operating System is slimmed down. It doesn’t have to support the wide range of hardware that Windows tries to support… It only has to run on systems built by Apple… so, I was initially expecting it to be a little sluggish, but it’s not. It came with OS X Lion 10.7 and hooks to a standard keyboard, mouse, and monitor.  I’m surprised at how smoothly it runs.

So… Now I get to learn all about how the innards of how this system works too, and I’ll get to play around with interoperability of it with both Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux. Will probably be playing a lot with remote desktop so that I don’t need extra monitors, keyboards and mice.

You can read all about the Mac mini on Apples’s web site (www.apple.com). When you get there just pick the Mac menu and then click on the Mac mini.

I included the picture so you could get an idea of how small the box is, EVERYTHING fit inside of the box.  Power cord, video adaptor, user manual, and the Mac mini.

Since I’ve been asked… Here’s how *I* digitize vinyl… there are many ways to do it, There are lots of different tools that you can use.  This is how *I* do it at the moment on my Windows 7 computer.

The procedures I use make it a tedious process but the results are well worth the effort to preserve all of that keepsake vinyl a lot of people still have stashed in closets. Since there are a lot of steps, I’m going to break this up into three posts over the next week or so. When you’re done you can play the files on your IPod, or any other device that can play MP3s.

Other parts of the Digitizing Vinyl series:

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 1-A (additional info for dbx encoded records)

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 2

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 3

This is Part 1 – Capturing the file and performing limited digital processing.

In this section you’re going to capture a side of an album, process it and then save it.

Stuff you need:

1. Turntable (line level preamp included)
2. Computer with line input (duh)
3. A copy of Audacity (Awesome Free Software)
4. A copy of the MP3 CODECs (Code/Decodes sound to MP3)
5. A copy of MP3TAG

Do this for each side of the record:
If you have a record cleaning brush to clean the grooves use it… The more lint, dust and other crud you remove from the record, the better.

Steps:

Step 1.

Capture the entire album side with Audacity in 1 run. If you have skips you’re going to need to work them as you see fit; I try to manually hold the tone-arm back when I know there are skips, I’ve surprised myself by making recordings of a few scratched albums that you can’t tell were scratched in the final MP3.

Step 2.

Save the file in Audacity’s native file format (.aup)

 

Step 3.

Select the entire album (ctrl+A)

Step 4.

 
Select the Effect Menu, then Select Click Removal, Then select the remove clicks button… Wait

 

Step 5.

Use the left scroll slider on the bottom of the screen to select the very beginning of the album, it’ll be as far to the left as it can go.

Step 6.

Find an area at the beginning of the record where there’s surface noise from the record but no scratches or pops and NO MUSIC. Select a VERY NARROW area in the noise.

Step 7.

Select the Effect Menu, Select Noise Removal, and then click the "Get Noise Profile" button.
Note: if you select a large area of noise, the final product won’t sound very good.

 

Step 8.

Select the entire album again (ctrl+A)

Step 9.

Select the Effect Menu, Select Noise Removal, and then click the "Remove Noise" button.

After the noise removal procedure completes the noise signature goes almost flat as depicted in the next image:

Step 10.

The last step is to Save the file again so that you save all of the work you just completed… Select File, and then select Save.

That is the end of the capture and processing and the end of Part 1 of this series…

Part 2 of this series will describe chopping and exporting the individual tracks into individual mp3 files.
Part 3 will tell you how to tag the file and add album art.