#Vinylstudio win full#

It’s going to take a while to get your gear in order, you’ve got several decisions to make, and each LP you “rip” is going to take actual time. I’ll say it again: This is going to be a process – a long one. But when you square off with a stack of LPs, you find out quick that you’ve got some hurdles to clear – I was totally unprepared for how involved all of this would become. The metadata (album title, artist, track names, recording year, and album art) are often retrieved automatically, and you never give a thought to dealing with surface noise. When you rip a CD, the whole process is pretty much automatic – stick it in, click Go, and you’re done in minutes (my iMac’s optical drive rips at around 16x). So you want to digitize your LP collection? That’s awesome, but slow down, cowboy – this isn’t going to happen overnight. In this guide, I’ll cover the process of prepping your gear, cleaning your records, and capturing as much of the essence of those old LPs as possible, so you can enjoy them in the context of your digital life. But it can be incredibly rewarding, and going through the process puts you back in touch with music the way it used to be played (i.e. In 2011, I finally decided it was time to hunker down and digitize the stacks, to un-forget all those excellent records.ĭigitizing LPs has almost nothing in common with ripping CDs. Most of my CD purchases from the 90s and 00’s had been ripped long ago, but the LPs were locked in limbo – wasn’t listening to them, but couldn’t bear to let go, either. I personally held onto around 700 records made before the 90s, in addition to a few boxes of records my parents left in my care.

Over time, many of us stopped listening to LPs altogether – but that doesn’t mean we got rid of them. Eventually, most of us gave in to temptation and started listening only (or mostly) to files stored on a computer somewhere in the house. We complained that the typical MP3 was encoded at bitrates too low to do justice to the music, but we learned to encode at higher resolutions, or to use uncompressed/lossless formats. We complained that CDs lacked the “warmth” of vinyl, but CD technology got better over time. We loved our vinyl despite and because of its warts, but we also didn’t hesitate to go digital when the time came – first with CDs, and then with MP3s and other file-based formats. The cost of admission was pops and scratches, warped discs, having to get up in the middle of an album to flip the disc, cleaning the grooves from time to time, and getting hernias every time you moved to a new apartment. Dragging a rock through vinyl was not some kind of nostalgic love affair with the past – it was just the way things were. Long-playing records represent an era when music was less disposable – we actually sat down to listen, rather than treating music as a backdrop to the rest of life. LPs were music you could touch, with glorious full-color 12″ album art, meandering liner notes, and the practical involvement of lowering needle to plastic. Hundreds of pounds of space-consuming, damage-prone vinyl.

#Vinylstudio win full#

For anyone over 40 (or maybe 30), having a music collection probably means that, in addition to racks of CDs and ridiculous piles of MP3s, you’re also sitting on bookshelves (or “borrowed” milk crates) full of vinyl LPs.