vinyl to mp3

[cutflow]

i'm not completely satisfied with the sound that my mp3 conversions are coming out. they don't sound good enough.

this is what i've been using:

1. audacity
2. shure whitelabel stylus
3. my audiocard > asus xonar dg [ http://www.asus.com/Sound_Cards_and_...ters/Xonar_DG/ ]

after i record vinyl to mp3, i always pump the gain to 7+ on audacity because that is the volume that matches the volume of an mp3 from beatport. i don't do anything else on audacity. i don't really hear clicks so i dont rly fuck with the clickremovable feature and plus my vinyls are new.

if i was to guess what i can upgrade, i would say getting expensive stylus just for conversion.

thanks in advance for the help i'm going to need.

[dripstep]

Are you running phono out on the turntable, into a line in on your pc? if so, you need a preamp to boost the signal from your turntable.

[cutflow]

Are you running phono out on the turntable, into a line in on your pc? if so, you need a preamp to boost the signal from your turntable.

i'm running phono from tt to djm350. then i'm running master output from mixer to i think "line in" on pc card

is that good enough?

how about the shure whitelabel, i think for practicing mixing/beatmatching and the sound quality is amazing but maybe they are garbage for conversion ?

[bumtsch]

Going through the mixer colors the sound and since the 350 is digital, that's two extra conversions you're going through (AD + DA), altering the sound further - you'd get an improvement by doing TT -> audio interface with a preamp.
Don't record too hot a signal, adjust your input gain to make sure the input stage isn't getting overloaded then add gain back in software.
I tried using Audacity's click removal, IMO you've made a good choice by avoiding it altogether.

What sample rate are you recording at ? It's possible ripping at 96k then resampling to 44.1 (or now, 48k) with a proper program might yield better results than just ripping straight to 44.1k, it made a noticeable difference for me.
Finally I find there is a slight loss of clarity in the top end (even before resampling) so I usually give a gentle boost to frequencies above 15k or so.

You could get an archival or hi-fi needle for ripping, but frankly since this is getting played at gigs I'd rather have my rips sound as if I were playing the real vinyl with my club needles - and the Whitelabel is supposedly very good at that. A hi-fi cart would take even further fiddling with the EQ to get it to sound livelier.

My 2c

[maxwelldub]

Going through the mixer colors the sound and since the 350 is digital, that's two extra conversions you're going through (AD + DA), altering the sound further - you'd get an improvement by doing TT -> audio interface with a preamp.
Don't record too hot a signal, adjust your input gain to make sure the input stage isn't getting overloaded then add gain back in software.
I tried using Audacity's click removal, IMO you've made a good choice by avoiding it altogether.

What sample rate are you recording at ? It's possible ripping at 96k then resampling to 44.1 (or now, 48k) with a proper program might yield better results than just ripping straight to 44.1k, it made a noticeable difference for me.
Finally I find there is a slight loss of clarity in the top end (even before resampling) so I usually give a gentle boost to frequencies above 15k or so.

You could get an archival or hi-fi needle for ripping, but frankly since this is getting played at gigs I'd rather have my rips sound as if I were playing the real vinyl with my club needles - and the Whitelabel is supposedly very good at that. A hi-fi cart would take even further fiddling with the EQ to get it to sound livelier.

My 2c

convert to wav/aiff/flac instead. your ears will thank you

[3heads]

You're using an extremely cheap consumer soundcard and wondering why your vinyl rips don't sound good? You can't be serious.

[LoopCat]

^ ease up.

[johnm]

Clean your records first. I cant believe how dirty my record wash is after washing what look like even new records. the grime you pick up at the club on your fingers while mixing plus skin oil just gets into the them..

I'm using a 1210M5G With an Ortofon Night Club 2 with an Elliptical stylus. A Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi HD Sound Card with Phono preamp. record as Wave using Audacity at 24-bit with sampling rate of 96 kHz.

I'll usually then convert to Flac or AIFF to add better tag support and album art..

[bumtsch]

convert to wav/aiff/flac instead. your ears will thank you

No, save as wav/aiff/flac along with the whole process. Not just instead of it all. Since using lossless has been standard to me for over 6 years, I guess I forgot to mention that

[teambama]

I do mine straight to a digital recorder. I actually run it through a apogee mini me bypassing the preamp only using the analog to digital converter in the mini me. but everyone doesn't have a mini me laying around.

I archive it in 24/48 then convert it to wav or mp3