Adventure Gamers - Forums

Moved to here from the Adventure Games forum to avoid any thread pollution

rtrooney - 08 October 2022 07:20 PM

Jabod - 08 October 2022 08:25 AM

Having completed the digitisation of my record collection I’ve now been able to return to playing some games.

I’ll comment on the other stuff later. But you deserve kudos for completing this task. I tried it. Have around 1K vinyl albums. They take up a lot of space. My wife bought me a turntable designed for the digitization process. Computer hook-ups and software installation went well. And then I realized the real problems. One, the digitalization was going to take place in “real time!” So, for every LP I was recording, I would probably be spending an equivalent amount of time monitoring/tweaking/labeling/et al each and every one of the 1K+ albums. And two, because this was before the era of dirt-cheap SSDs, I had no concepts of what it would cost to save those digital audio images. I think I was about 40 albums into the project when I gave up. Not that it’s a great solution, but I figured the cost of my time, storage, etc., I might be better off just purchasing, when available, CDs of all my records. Most are in the bargain bins by now. So it wasn’t that big a hit. And, for those that could not be replicated, I can digitalize them. Surprisingly out of the 1K+ albums, only 28 could not be found on CD.

I appreciate your problem Tim. I have around 370 albums (vinyl) and it took me 6 months to do those working to a fairly disciplined 2 albums per morning. Obviously there were times when this couldn’t happen but, by and large, that was how it went. Your collection would, by extension, take around 18 months to do assuming the same rate per day was maintained.
The reason that I started on this odyssey was because I wanted to give my collection a chance to survive after I die. The person who inherits might prefer the space for other things, might prefer to cash in on the value, doesn’t (currently!) like the music it contains.

I did some investigation prior to starting mainly because I wasn’t going to be moving my Linn deck around to facilitate this. I bought a deck that has both RCA outputs and USB output. This was a deck by Donner, a Swedish company. Cost £200 and I found a couple of poor design items but, overall, it did a good job.

Software was next and though I could use Audacity (free) it was rather labour intensive so looked elsewhere. There’s some very expensive software out there but I found some called Vinyl Studio from AlpineSoft which cost just under £30. If you want to have a look at it you can find it here: https://www.alpinesoft.co.uk/ It appears to be a one man band (Paul Sanders) show but it does a really amazing job. Imports track listings and sleeve art (where it finds it on Discogs which is 98% of the time – you can manually add/change as appropriate), places track breaks from the track times – adjustments normally needed but that is the work of a few seconds – audio can be de-clicked automatically to clean up sound and loads more besides. I can’t recommend it enough. There is a learning curve but the support forums are extremely helpful and Paul responds very quickly indeed.

One thing I picked up on straight away was the amount of time this was going to take so backup was a necessity. There is a quirk in how the software works that means it is best to plan carefully from the outset (if you ever go down this route (or anybody else for that matter) get in touch and I’ll explain properly). Initial storage was written to an external, mains powered, 3TB hard drive which I had spare from a project that never materialised. By the time I finished, including ripped CDs, 674Gb of space was used. Vinyl and CDs were FLAC format with vinyl recorded at 24bit, 96KHZ and CDs at 44KHZ (bit rate unknown as CDs used different software and the highest quality I could choose was CD and I don’t know what that entails). After each session that data was copied to a second external HD that I had to buy (4TB, £80) using software called AllWaySync which cost a further £25. There’s a reason for using that software which I’ll explain if you’d like to know. That HD was removed after each session and stored elsewhere for security.

One thing that I had intended to do was then copy everything to my small NAS so that the music could be accessed throughout the house provided you had access to my network. My TV could play them, phones, tablets, laptops, PCs etc. Then the controller card on the NAS failed. I wasn’t going to replace it just then and was expecting to pay around £150 when I did. Then I found a full blown NAS, a 28TB, dual disc, with full software (my original was a single 2TB disc, no software) down from £1,000 to £600. As this could be set to Raid 1 (mirrored 14TB) it meant that I had a further backup with better network facilities so went for it.

Anything else you wish to know just ask – assuming that you got this far of course

I’m not going to quote you as my original post plus your response would likely have us on page 3.

You outlined many of the problems I encounter. One. my software was Audacity and it was cumbersome to use. And it did a lousy job of filtering clicks, pops and other extraneous noise. I don’t know when your software became available, but I started my project a little over ten years ago, so it may not have been available. Two, based on your 680+ Gb total, my collection would have totaled a little over 2 Tb. A multi -Tb HD was hard to find back then, in addition to being quite expensive. Today I can buy 4@ Western Digital 500 Gb SSDs for about $200 US. (I also never planned to digitize my CDs. Which is why I thought repurchasing my collection on CDs was a good idea at the time.) Three, I never really calculated the amount of time the endeavor would take. I figure it would take about 1.5 hrs/album which would include setup, recording and backup. That’s a LOT of time.

Good thing is that If I ever decided to go back and do this correctly, I know who to contact.

VinylStudio has been around since at least 2008 Tim although I have no idea how good/user friendly it was back then.
Once I got used to the software recording, cleaning and backup took around the length of album play time + 10 minutes so maybe 50 minutes for an average album. Once I started a side with speakers on low I got on with other stuff. As I was using my main PC no games were being played as no speakers available.

It turned out quite an expensive project, mainly due to the unexpected purchase of the NAS, but could be done (nowadays; certainly not at this price when you were originally looking to do the same) for roughly £400; that’s for two 4TB external HDs, a deck and the software but not including the NAS.

I’ve just done a check on the vinyl only file size for my 370 albums (many of which have never been released on CD ) and that comes in at 280GB so your collection would still be less than 1TB and that’s assuming that you use the same high level encoding that I did. To be honest anyone willing to commit the amount of time needed to do this would be an idiot to use anything lower. Time is no different, the only extra needed is storage.

if you, or anyone else, would like to know more drop a line into this thread and, assuming I’m still alive , I’ll do my best to help.

Jabod - 09 October 2022 03:39 PM

I’ve just done a check on the vinyl only file size for my 370 albums (many of which have never been released on CD ) and that comes in at 280GB so your collection would still be less than 1TB and that’s assuming that you use the same high level encoding that I did. To be honest anyone willing to commit the amount of time needed to do this would be an idiot to use anything lower. Time is no different, the only extra needed is storage.

I was in the “music business” for several years. Starting with being Advertising and Sales Promotion Manager for Electro-Voice for a little over five years and later stints with both Sony and Audio Technica. One of our clients was Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs who put out some really great half-speed mastered LPs. I’m not sure what the current status is, but of the 28 albums not available on CD about 75% of them were MFSL disks.

Forgive me if we crossed paths on another topic on another thread back in the AG forum. It was on the subject of compression. Somebody made a statement about compression. I made a comment about compression from a musician’s point of view such as a compression pedal on a guitar pedal board. And somebody, perhaps you, correctly chimed in that loss-less compression at relatively low bit rates was certainly possible.