3 Replies Latest reply: Mar 25, 2008 11:30 AM by _durin_ RSS

    Use soundbooth to digitize LPs?

    Spoot51 Community Member
      Trying not to be too naive, but can Soundbooth be used to record from a turntable hooked to my pc to preserve my old LP records? I assume Soundbooth is all I need to edit the recorded files and convert to .wav?
      Will Sounbooth detect a turntable as a Device? And finally, any preference to using a USB vs "old fashioned" RCA hookup for the turntable?
      Thanks in advance
        • 1. Re: Use soundbooth to digitize LPs?
          _durin_ Employee Hosts
          Hi Thomas,

          Soundbooth works great for recording, cleaning up, and exporting to digital files your vinyl collection. I've used it myself to digitize and repair dozens of my records.

          Soundbooth is indifferent to the source device - it simply captures whatever data your audio card sends it, so you'll need to make certain you have a decent quality sound card. You can pick up the USB turntables, that contain their own internal sound device, and those work pretty well. The quality can differ between brands and models, but generally they're good for their purpose and very simple to configure.

          If you already have a sound device, you'll probably need to patch your turntable through a pre-amp first as the turntable signal output is much different than the standard Line-Out on other devices. If nothing else, you can connect your turntable to your home receiver, connect the Tape-Out from the receiver to your sound card's Line Input port, and Soundbooth will record any audio coming in on that port.

          Hope that helps!
          Durin
          • 2. Re: Use soundbooth to digitize LPs?
            Spoot51 Community Member
            Thanks, Durin!That's good news. I chose the Audio Technica AT-PL120 for $150 at Amazon. It has a switch which allows direct connection (using y connecter RCA to mini plug) into the pc using the built-in pre-amp or hooking it up through a component system to the line in on my sound card. Had to buy new turntable because my last one expired sometime in the early 1990's! I'm looking forward to archiving my 300 plus albums, some of which date back to the 1960's. Some friends tell me to just buy the CD's of the stuff I really like, but what fun would that be?
            • 3. Re: Use soundbooth to digitize LPs?
              _durin_ Employee Hosts
              Thomas,

              No fun at all! I've got a huge record collection that I need to really start digitizing (this year for sure!) A lot of it was never reissued on CD, so picking it up new is not an option. For others, the album versions were just mixed and mastered much better than any of the CD re-releases. (I'm looking at you, every Led Zeppelin album ever put out...)

              You'll probably want to look into picking up an additional application to help rename and populate your files with the proper Metadata. Unfortunately, I have had a difficult time finding an application to do all of that, and well. The best so far is IEatBrainz for Mac or MusicBrainz Picard for Windows, though these perform an analysis then check with a server to find matches. There are others, whose names I can't recall right now, that will let you look up and select the proper album and title, then fix all the files.

              Anyways, good luck!
              durin