Digitizing vinyl switching from Spin Doctor

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Hermie
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Jun 19, 2011 11:40 am
Location: Netherlands

Digitizing vinyl switching from Spin Doctor

Post by Hermie »

Hi all,

Until now I've been using various iterations of CD Spin Doctor to get ye olde vinyl collection into my Mac. It's never been great, but it worked. Worked I say, cuz the latest version really is a complete mess.

A few days ago I saw Amadeus Pro had been upgraded so I went for it. Only then I sorta realised I can also use Amadeus for recording vinyl. Duh, I have had a license for ages.

So I hooked my stuff up again (just doing this occasionally when I feel like it) and lo and behold, recording including record flip over went rather smoothly. Put the resulting file through ClickRepair (love it, also long time user) and so far so good.

Now I'm getting to grips with Amadeus' marker thingie and I'm getting the hang of it. Hey, I'm not in a hurry, my records have been collecting dust for some forty years.

But here's the thing I'm looking for comments on, so I know if I'm missing some handy tricks. So far I figured out two modi operandi to end up with an audio CD containing correct track names (or song names, tracks seem to mean something different in Amadeus).

The first one leaves my recorded file intact and goes as follows: right at the start of the recording I put a marker and call it for instance Touchdown (I probably can leave this one out, but bear with me please). Then, a wee bit further I put a marker and give it a name, 01 - Song Title. then song 2 etc. At the end of record Side 1 come a few seconds of rumble because of flipping the record and putting the needle back on. So, at the end of the last song of Side 1 I put a marker called let's say FlipOver. Then the next one will be the first song of Side 2. At the end of the last song comes one called Yay Finished and I hit Save.

Now I go for the Split According to Markers option et voila, all my songs in a neat new folder. Only thing to do now is to ditch the Touchdown, FlipOver and Yay Finished files I want to get rid off and throw the rest onto Toast for my Audio CD. Long story, but that's one way that seems to work for me.

The other method I want to try out is not going to Toast at the end, but using Amadeus' Burn button. Would be nice, but at the moment I haven't figured out yet if there is a way of doing this without altering my recorded file. To be more precise, I'm looking for a way to select a piece of sound like the record turn-over part and adding some kind of flag that it won't be included when I burn through Amadeus. Haven't found it yet and perhaps this is not possible at all.

Which would leave me with just deleting the needle on record, flip-over and running out end part from the file. I mean, what's not there anymore can't be burned and I should end up with the same Audio CD as with method one, right?

So, am I getting close or do you guys use a completely different way of getting to the end result? Method two wouldn't be any good if the goal is to FLAC the files and upload them somewhere. The first one would be fine for this, though. BTW I found the Align Markers thingie and understand what it's for.

Any thoughts?

Have fun, Hermie

Ron Fleckner
Posts: 41
Joined: Tue Jan 22, 2008 1:59 am
Location: Melbourne Australia

Digitizing vinyl switching from Spin Doctor

Post by Ron Fleckner »

Hi Hermie,

Not sure if by getting the track names for the CD you mean having them encoded somehow on the CD as digital data. I don't know if that's possible (because I'm clueless about that), but here's what I have done:

Pretty much what you've described, except I don't bother naming the markers anything other than by number. (If you start with number one for the first marker, AP will automatically increment them as you go. But you don't even need that. They could all be named 'George' as far as that matters.) I then edit the part of the file that is between side 1 and side 2 of the record so that it is about the same length as the gap between other tunes on the vinyl disk. I don't bother splitting the large file into smaller files for burning. In fact, if you leave the whole file as is and just put markers between the tracks without deleting the non-musical 'silence' between the tracks, when you play your CD (or playlist in iTunes) it will play just like the original record. Now just burn to a CD from within AP, making sure that, at the appropriate point, you have checked that it will 'consider all markers'.

The magic occurs now. If you have iTunes set up so that it automatically starts up whenever an audio CD is inserted, then after AP has made the CD and it mounts, iTunes will start up and get the track names from Gracenote on the internet. It's amazingly tolerant of minor differences between the commercially available CD of your vinyl and your recording of it. It even works if you've done some post recording enhancement, such as using ClickRepair or doing equalization &etc. But it actually gets the right track names - unless you have some very obscure music that hasn't made it to CD, in which case you'll just have to type the names in.

Ron

On 19/06/2011, at 11:18 PM, Hermie wrote:
Hi all,

Until now I've been using various iterations of CD Spin Doctor to get ye olde vinyl collection into my Mac. It's never been great, but it worked. Worked I say, cuz the latest version really is a complete mess.

A few days ago I saw Amadeus Pro had been upgraded so I went for it. Only then I sorta realised I can also use Amadeus for recording vinyl. Duh, I have had a license for ages.

So I hooked my stuff up again (just doing this occasionally when I feel like it) and lo and behold, recording including record flip over went rather smoothly. Put the resulting file through ClickRepair (love it, also long time user) and so far so good.

Now I'm getting to grips with Amadeus' marker thingie and I'm getting the hang of it. Hey, I'm not in a hurry, my records have been collecting dust for some forty years.

But here's the thing I'm looking for comments on, so I know if I'm missing some handy tricks. So far I figured out two modi operandi to end up with an audio CD containing correct track names (or song names, tracks seem to mean something different in Amadeus).

The first one leaves my recorded file intact and goes as follows: right at the start of the recording I put a marker and call it for instance Touchdown (I probably can leave this one out, but bear with me please). Then, a wee bit further I put a marker and give it a name, 01 - Song Title. then song 2 etc. At the end of record Side 1 come a few seconds of rumble because of flipping the record and putting the needle back on. So, at the end of the last song of Side 1 I put a marker called let's say FlipOver. Then the next one will be the first song of Side 2. At the end of the last song comes one called Yay Finished and I hit Save.

Now I go for the Split According to Markers option et voila, all my songs in a neat new folder. Only thing to do now is to ditch the Touchdown, FlipOver and Yay Finished files I want to get rid off and throw the rest onto Toast for my Audio CD. Long story, but that's one way that seems to work for me.

The other method I want to try out is not going to Toast at the end, but using Amadeus' Burn button. Would be nice, but at the moment I haven't figured out yet if there is a way of doing this without altering my recorded file. To be more precise, I'm looking for a way to select a piece of sound like the record turn-over part and adding some kind of flag that it won't be included when I burn through Amadeus. Haven't found it yet and perhaps this is not possible at all.

Which would leave me with just deleting the needle on record, flip-over and running out end part from the file. I mean, what's not there anymore can't be burned and I should end up with the same Audio CD as with method one, right?

So, am I getting close or do you guys use a completely different way of getting to the end result? Method two wouldn't be any good if the goal is to FLAC the files and upload them somewhere. The first one would be fine for this, though. BTW I found the Align Markers thingie and understand what it's for.

Any thoughts?

Have fun, Hermie




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