Any tips on re-mastering a vinyl to cd

[trentaudioguy89]

hey guys dad wants his vinlys on cd and i was trying to get the sound off the vinyl to sound like a CD is that possible???

Just basically wanting to know if there are mastering tools out there to use for this purpose.

Cheers,
Trent

[angelestevisjr]

this is what you have to do...send the vynyle sound to your daw( maybe nuendo or cubase) on your input track open waves x or z noise plugin..and there you go...thanks

[jdbunda]

Well - that's a little oversimplified.

Do you have a turntable with decent cartridge? If it's old school with "phono" level outputs, you will need a phono pre-amp to get a properly EQ'd line-level signal into your audio interface. You could use a receiver (or any piece of audio gear that has a phono input) with line outs. By plugging this in to your audio interface, you can now get the audio into your DAW or other recording software.

Next, though, you will probably want to process the signal a bit to remove clicks/pops and other objectionable vinyl noise. There is some good free/cheap mastering software out there to do this, and also separate into individual mp3 files, do track labeling, and so on. Google is your friend, search for "vinyl to mp3" or something like that. If you are doing a lot of these, this is MUCH easier than trying to do it one track at a time through your DAW.

[garageband]

Just basically wanting to know if there are mastering tools out there to use for this purpose.

Most of the difficulty of doing this (my wife and I did about 280 78 and 45 sides for my dad a while back) is not so much getting it in the machine. I would actually shy away from a device that imparts its idea of the RIAA curve on the material. You really want every last drop of frequency content to work with in the DAW environment.

What will be most of your headache is the surface noise and pops and clicks will eat up you headroom. Just recording it, normalizing it will give you quiet tracks that sound rough and are not particularly enjoyable. This is related to the difficulty of trying to batch process these. Just because one track is noisy, the rest needn't suffer. Similarly, different vinyl will need The best tool I have run across is BIAS' Soundsoap Pro. It does an amazing job of repairing pops and clicks. You're not going to find anything like this free on the internet.

We recorded these to one long track in the DAW and made markers for each. When the recording phase was done, they were bounced with plug-ins. They were then each exported to the two track editor (Peak) for trimming, normalization, spot gain reduction, drawing out the really big pops Soundsoap couldn't fix (hardly any), labeling with metadata and saving as mp3s.

You will certainly want to EQ and use a look-ahead limiter as well. If the material is in rough physical shape, a fancy multi-band compressor can bring it back to life.

Here's one that was in tough shape but we could let it get away. It charted #7 in 1944.

[angelestevisjr]

The Only Way To Takeoff That Lp Noise Is With Waves Z Noise Plugin..

[garageband]

The Only Way To Takeoff That Lp Noise Is With Waves Z Noise Plugin..

Huh? What do you mean?

[trentaudioguy89]

thanks for the feedback much appreciated

[garageband]

So what's plan? We're invested now and want to know.