Next you will need to start assembling the hardware for your system. First you will need a turntable if you want to do vinyl records. If you also have some old cassette tapes you may also want to have a tape deck. Most of the electronic stores such as Rex, Best Buys, and Circuit City etc. carry some turntables. Or you can type Turntable or tape deck into a search engine or on Ebay and order one on line. You know your own financial situation so make your choices on what you want to spend that will give you as much quality as you can afford. You will also want to look at the possibility of adding a good quality soundcard to your computer. Maybe you already have a good sound card and won't need to purchase that either. You may have to purchase some cables to connect the various things to the sound card. Beside the cable also keep in mind that you may also need adaptor plugs to go between the various components and cables. Another component you may need is a pre-Amp for your turntable. Here again you may not need one depending on weather you turntable has a preamp in it. Also some sound cards also come with a built in pre-Amp. The DMX 6Fire by Terratec does for one. It also comes with a bay mount front where you can plug the cables into the front of the computer. This saves crawling behind the computer every time you want to change cables and components. Another thing you probably will want is a pair of headphones, that way everyone else in the house doesn't have to listen in on your works in progress. You may also need another power strip to power the additional equipment. You may want to do searches on the Internet of any one or all these hardware items to get an idea of price ranges and quality of each component. You may already own most of these things if not you will want to start looking at what is available. There are some stand-alone record players with CD burning capabilities. You may want to go that route as well. If purchasing items try to look at what kind of connectors are on the various components so you have an idea of the cables you may need or adapters.
You may also want to buy an amplifier-tuner for sound amplification and listening to or recording from radio. It would not be a requirement but you may want to add that at some point down the road.
After you have decided what you need to purchase the next step would be to start getting the components together. When you start gathering them up we will look at software as the next consideration. If you buy an all-in-one type unit the software may not be as in depth as for the many variable of the other components. That's why I'll give you a week or so to search around and at least get an idea of what you want as far as quality and affordability of the components you choose. Next week we will look more in depth into software.
To those of you who have systems up and running maybe you will want to leave some additional things that maybe I missed. Or share a specific piece of hardware that you are using.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Read an article
One of the first things will be reading a couple of articles about the process. PC users can find an article here, here, here, or here.
Mac users will find an article here or here.
This will give you a fairly good idea of what digitizing vinyl records or cassette tapes is all about. I am not saying that you need to read every article or even all of one article but you should read about hardware and software and get a rough idea of what is involved. I encourage you to goggle some searches for your self if you have additional questions. If you know of a better article please share in the comments for all that follow.
diakoneo
Mac users will find an article here or here.
This will give you a fairly good idea of what digitizing vinyl records or cassette tapes is all about. I am not saying that you need to read every article or even all of one article but you should read about hardware and software and get a rough idea of what is involved. I encourage you to goggle some searches for your self if you have additional questions. If you know of a better article please share in the comments for all that follow.
diakoneo
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Getting started digitizing vinyl records.
Getting started digitizing vinyl records.
I am not going to go into a lot of detail on my blog but I am going to get you started or at least looking at what goes into digitizing a vinyl record. Some of the equipment used and a few locations that you may be able to find things. I will give you topics and some links to sites that tell you all the details. These are not the definitive answer to how to do digitizing but are sites I found when I started to put this together. I would suggest doing some searches on your own if you have further questions. Start with the topics that I present or ideas presented on these sites to further your understanding by searching those topics you find of interesting.
Presenting this was a suggestion I received from someone who is interested in getting started in digitizing and sharing some of their collection of these rare Jesus Music albums. He suggested adding a getting started section to my blog to help those who want to do this but don’t know how. I will try to walk you thru the various steps that you may encounter. Really it is a fairly simple process that you repeat with each vinyl record you do. Basically it requires you to play a record on a turntable and record it into the computer. Depending on how you choose to setup your system and the hardware and software combination you choose will provide some of the challenges ahead. Some software can take a record song and record it and convert it to MP3’s directly. Other software requires that you record into your computer in waveform then convert to MP3 with a different software program (sometimes within the same program). There are a lot of variables and I am not familiar with all of them. So, feel free to ask questions in the comments section and maybe someone else may have a solution. Please also be patient as I am working on putting this altogether on the fly so I may get some things out of a logical order and may explain a small portion of the steps at a time. The next section may well answer your question. I’d suggest writing down questions and if I don’t answer them in a couple more post then maybe ask them then. A lot of times I work with an open word pad or note pad file open to cut and paste information to then use it to add links etc. into this. It may also help with song titles later on. After the album is in MP3 form you can zip the files or folder all into one file to share or store, usually done with WINRAR.
Things you will need to be considering. Sound card, memory, both ram and HD storage, software, other hardware, turntable (for playing the vinyl record on), tape deck (for doing cassette tapes)(you may or may not want this depending on your music collection), digital camera, photo software (which you may already have). I’m currently not aware of a scanner that can scan a vinyl record album cover in one pass. Maybe there is one and someone could share that information in the comments. Also a CD burner drive will be needed. Here again there are a great many variables in building your system to meet your wants and needs. There are players that can play MP3 CD-R’s and others do not. Or you may want to burn CD-R’s in wave format to play in your car or share with others. But these are things that you will want to be considering as you begin to assemble your system.
I am mainly familiar with PC’s and not MAC’s. So I have or will be providing a few links to MAC files or documents as well. If you own a MAC then you will want to read some of those articles as well. Again maybe there are some MAC users that will add comments that pertain to MAC’s. The basic concepts are still in play in either environment. Just details may be different, or steps may be somewhat different. If we work together I think we can help each other out a lot. You may also want to collect and save album artwork and then you may want graphics software for touching up the photos or additional photo processing software.
I encourage some of the people already digitizing to add comments or suggestions and help answer questions in the comments section. We can all still learn more as we go along. Maybe you have something that works better or maybe you have a specific program that someone else needs help with. Maybe you know of a better site that might explain something better than another site. I know I had trouble with math but found a professor that knew multiple ways to present concepts and if the one he used in class did not help he knew another way to present it to me in his office. I may not be able to explain something but maybe someone else can. I am willing to learn with everyone else.
diakoneo
Presenting this was a suggestion I received from someone who is interested in getting started in digitizing and sharing some of their collection of these rare Jesus Music albums. He suggested adding a getting started section to my blog to help those who want to do this but don’t know how. I will try to walk you thru the various steps that you may encounter. Really it is a fairly simple process that you repeat with each vinyl record you do. Basically it requires you to play a record on a turntable and record it into the computer. Depending on how you choose to setup your system and the hardware and software combination you choose will provide some of the challenges ahead. Some software can take a record song and record it and convert it to MP3’s directly. Other software requires that you record into your computer in waveform then convert to MP3 with a different software program (sometimes within the same program). There are a lot of variables and I am not familiar with all of them. So, feel free to ask questions in the comments section and maybe someone else may have a solution. Please also be patient as I am working on putting this altogether on the fly so I may get some things out of a logical order and may explain a small portion of the steps at a time. The next section may well answer your question. I’d suggest writing down questions and if I don’t answer them in a couple more post then maybe ask them then. A lot of times I work with an open word pad or note pad file open to cut and paste information to then use it to add links etc. into this. It may also help with song titles later on. After the album is in MP3 form you can zip the files or folder all into one file to share or store, usually done with WINRAR.
Things you will need to be considering. Sound card, memory, both ram and HD storage, software, other hardware, turntable (for playing the vinyl record on), tape deck (for doing cassette tapes)(you may or may not want this depending on your music collection), digital camera, photo software (which you may already have). I’m currently not aware of a scanner that can scan a vinyl record album cover in one pass. Maybe there is one and someone could share that information in the comments. Also a CD burner drive will be needed. Here again there are a great many variables in building your system to meet your wants and needs. There are players that can play MP3 CD-R’s and others do not. Or you may want to burn CD-R’s in wave format to play in your car or share with others. But these are things that you will want to be considering as you begin to assemble your system.
I am mainly familiar with PC’s and not MAC’s. So I have or will be providing a few links to MAC files or documents as well. If you own a MAC then you will want to read some of those articles as well. Again maybe there are some MAC users that will add comments that pertain to MAC’s. The basic concepts are still in play in either environment. Just details may be different, or steps may be somewhat different. If we work together I think we can help each other out a lot. You may also want to collect and save album artwork and then you may want graphics software for touching up the photos or additional photo processing software.
I encourage some of the people already digitizing to add comments or suggestions and help answer questions in the comments section. We can all still learn more as we go along. Maybe you have something that works better or maybe you have a specific program that someone else needs help with. Maybe you know of a better site that might explain something better than another site. I know I had trouble with math but found a professor that knew multiple ways to present concepts and if the one he used in class did not help he knew another way to present it to me in his office. I may not be able to explain something but maybe someone else can. I am willing to learn with everyone else.
diakoneo
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