[Macpartners] digitizing vinyl records

[Scott McGuire]

At 12:00 PM -0500 12/8/06, Steve Burke wrote:
>I've done quite a bit of work digitizing vinyl records, cassette 
>tapes, and even some reel-to-reels.
>
>Amplifier/Tape Out to your Audio/Microphone-In.
>
>Software - http://www.hairersoft.com
>	Amadeus II (PowerPC, runs in Rosetta on Intel) $30
>	Amadeus Pro (Beta:  Universal, PowerPC, Intel) $40
>
>Excellent software for editing, cleaning, defining tracks, etc. 
>Very powerful for very little money.

I second Steve's recommendation of Amadeus for importing the sound 
and editing it.

I tried Audacity, and my experience was that on the Macintosh it was 
slow, crashed often, and was hard to figure out.  (It may work better 
on other operating systems.)  Amadeus is much better.

I wasn't ever able to get Amadeus's cleaning features to work 
satisfactorily for me.  For cleaning up clicks, pops, and crackle 
from the record, I recommend ClickRepair:

<http://wwwmaths.anu.edu.au/~briand/sound/>

It's more user-friendly than Amadeus's cleaning features - it's 
pretty much automatic, and it does an amazing job.  It does cost $35, 
though, so it may only be worth it if you're digitizing a lot of 
records.  (And it only deals with pops and clicks, not hiss; Amadeus 
has a feature to remove hiss/rumble, although I found it removed an 
undesirable amount of the real sound as well.)

--Scott McGuire