Between my wife and I, we must have over 300 vinyl records, LP's. We haven't had a decent turntable to play them on in about 10 years. I have now undertaken the task of trying to digitalize our musical past.
One of the major decisions I have to make on every recording, is do I keep those clicks and pops that were a feature of this medium. To me that was how I remember listening to these songs. Without that little pop at that certain point, sometimes it just doesn't seem the same.
The crystal clear sound of the CD makes sure that you always get the same sound every time you hear it, but after a needle has drug through the grooves of a LP a few hundred times, that particular album becomes part of your personal history and all it's little flaws actually become endearing.
1 comment:
I've been digitizing my albums for the past year or so. It's not as glamorous and it may seem! The time committment is considerable. First, you have to listen to every record, so that's around an hour. You then need to isolate each song that's been digitized. Most programs have a semi-intelligent system to ID song starts and stops, but if there is a pause in a song, or the volume goes too low, it can see it as a song ending. This takes 15-20 mins. I choose to run the music thru a filter in my software to remove the pops and hisses, and that takes another 15-20 mins. Burn to CD is 10 or 15 mins. Figure 2 hours per album. Times 300 is 600 hours which is 75 work days. And that's if you don't have any skips (which you will) where you have to re-record the song.
It's worth it, but it takes some time.
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