When I was in my twenties and financially irresponsible, my favorite form of retail therapy (and debt accumulation) was buying records. I built up a collection of more then 500 vinyl albums. Most of them were acquired during the three years or so that I was a DJ at community radio station KCMU; they reflect my tastes at the time which were heavily influenced by the eclectic nature of the station.
The last time I had my album collection available for use was when I lived in Boston before moving back to Seattle in 1997. Since then they have been in boxes in storage. A few years ago my storage locker was burglarized and my turntable was stolen, so I didn't even have a way to play albums any more. But I would still occasionally think about favorite music that was languishing in those boxes. Once I moved everything from the storage locker to the attic in my new garage, I also started worrying about all that weight up there.
In May, I bought a USB turntable at Costco and started the project of ripping albums to MP3s. Carol's father is interested in doing the same thing so we split the cost.
I ripped a few LPs in June but then got busy with school and the garage and stopped for a couple of months. At the beginning of September I started again and got pretty serious about it. I just finished this week.
A lot of the music I was buying in the 80s was pretty experimental. Much of it is outright angry. Many albums I would just bypass without even listening to. Others were borderline and I'd drop the needle on a few tracks to decide if I wanted to invest the time to convert them. Much of it is interesting, but I know I'll never listen to it again. Other albums had historical interest (some local New Wave bands, for example) but I knew I'd never want to listen to those again either. I think in the end I ripped about 1/3 of the albums I own.
I also came across many albums I know I never owned - I must have inherited them from a previous relationship. Most were junk (and in poor condition), but there were a few gems. Some Sergio Mendes from the 60s, as well as a couple of "Disneyland" label albums that are stories: "Snow White", "Peter and the Wolf", etc. from 1960. The latter are humorous because they tell the whole story on one side of an LP - limited to about 15 minutes - by speeding up the music and speaking very quickly.
I figured I'd write about my experience so that should you tackle such a project you'll know what you're getting into.
First of all, if you have a sizable collection your project is going to last weeks or months. I recommend that you set up a dedicated "station". You need room for the turntable, a staging area for the records, and a place for the computer within reach of the USB cable from the turntable.
Once you start ripping it's a multi-stage process:
1. Put on a record.
2. Fire up the ripping software (I use Audacity, an open source audio tool that came packaged with the turntable)
3. Start the record. Set a kitchen timer for 18-20 minutes.
4. When the timer goes off go check on the record and wait a few minutes if it isn't done yet. "Pause" the software, flip the record and start side 2, un-pause software. Set the timer again.
5. Timer goes off for side 2, "stop" the software. At this point you have the entire album as one big waveform in memory. You can save the raw data to a file, but I never did.
6. Using the software, pan and zoom around in the waveform to find song boundaries. This is easy for most "song" albums (the song breaks are readily visible in the waveform) and harder for less commercial works that have sounds between "songs" or pieces that blend together. You also probably want to clip out several seconds of silence at the end of every song.
7. Make markers at the song boundaries and type in song names at the markers. Audacity's UI for this is fairly crappy - double check before hitting return on each title. Depending on the album, you need a place to put the album cover and or the record itself to read the song titles from during this process.
8. Tell Audacity to store songs as MP3s. Enter artist and album title and "go". It takes about 5-10 minutes to write out the MP3 files. I made a file hierarchy in c:\<artist>\<album>. I knew I'd eventually import it all into iTunes so the structure didn't really matter, but I'm anal that way.
9. (optional) I edit the filenames that Audacity creates and put the track number as a prefix (e.g. "01-<first song title>.mp3") so I get file ordering that mirrors song order on the album.
10. Go to step 1.
Overall it takes about an hour per single album. I worked it into other stuff I was doing. For example, I can rip an album in the morning: start side 1 as soon as I get up and then go make breakfast for the girls. Turn the record over and then make breakfast for myself. Then maybe do the editing and title entry and saving (or leave it until evening). In the evening I can do several albums while doing other things like homework and dinner.
Note that Audacity has a feature to find "quiet" spots between songs automatically, but I never tried it. I liked doing it myself so I could put cut out as much blank space as possible and put the song start points exactly where I wanted them. This step is best accomplished using headphones. Audacity can also attempt to remove pops and other vinyl noises, but personally I find them charming so I didn't bother.
Once I was done I imported the ripped files into iTunes. Audacity sets the ID3 tags pretty well, but it has a weird list of genres so you have to fix some of those in iTunes. I also like to set the y part of "track x of y", and the compilation flag if appropriate. Then adding album art is a whole different task since you have to do it manually for LPs. iTunes does it by Gracenote signature - i.e. number of tracks and length as they are on the CD; your ripped tracks are never going to have the same time signature so iTunes rarely finds album art automatically. I find the album art somewhere (amazon, usually, or by Google image search) and drag it to iTunes. An image size between 200x200 and 300x300 works pretty well without wasting disk space.
I also add "from vinyl" to the comments for every ripped song. I have a smart playlist called "Vinyl" that automatically includes everything I've ripped.
I ended up ripping 173 albums (some were double or triple LPs) totaling 1,713 songs and 8.71 GB.
It was a long process but overall fairly painless. It's great having all that music available again in a format as convenient as iTunes. I rediscovered a lot of wonderful music along the way.
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