I have a lot of old vinyl LPs so being able to get these gems off and on to my computer was crucial. Anyway Audacity did the trick for me and the quality was excellent. It took a little getting used to the settings and what not but was well worth a little bit of trial and error. An i/o error stumped me for a bit but after killing artsd in Ksysguard and closing any music players it allowed me to record. At this moment l am recording and listening to at the same time an old Stanley Brothers record which is a treasure to me. I have both my turntable and amplifier sitting behind my computer. I bought a cable at The Source to do the job of connecting to my computer ... at one end is two RCA jacks ... red and white and at the other end is a single jack that allows me to plug into my sound card. Hope this might help anyone else especially people that are in my upper age bracket that could have a lot of vinyl laying around that they may have thought they wouldn't be able to bring into the computer/mp3 age ... don't you dare through it away!

Wayne

See also GramoFile:
http://www.opensourcepartners.nl/~costar/gramofile/

I've digitally encoded most of my vinyl and old cassettes as well.

I've known about and looked at Gramofile and l might give it a try too. Audacity will let me export an mp3 file and from what l read Gramofile only is using Wav which although is it is a better quality file it is huge compared to mp3.

Wayne

Could you describe the filters and other settings you used to get "the best" out of your vinyls? You probably had to remove "scratching noise" or other noises from some LPs that aged more than others.

Yves.

That's true, but for an archival file, lossless audio is best. You can still encode to mp3, then shrink the wavs by converting them to a heavily compressed Flac file...

The real good thing about GramoFile is that it splits the tracks for you based on a configurable length of silence between tracks.

Audacity has a noise removal filter, but I haven't has the best of luck with it. Basically you select a sample of 'just noise' then after it takes a reading you select the entire file. If you use it modestly it doesn't really make a difference, and if you use it aggressively, it removes more than just 'noise'. I haven't been able to find the 'sweet spot' myself. Maybe Wayne has had better luck?

Use Gnome Wave Cleaner (gwc) for noise removal

Like Bulliver says the filtering isn't much good in Audacity although it will let you edit a noise manually which would take a lot of time but l took rickh's suggestion and installed gwc and will give it a try after making a backup copy of a song which l feel l should clean up. I've kept most of my old vinyl in pretty good shape so l don't have a real serious problem on most of my albums with pops.

I'm glad l posted my original post since it is turning out to be a good discussion for like minded old vinyl owners. Also it took me a while to figure out what was causing the i/o error in Audacity so l hoped l could save others the time and aggravation.

Wayne