Digitizing Vinyl
i am going to digitize a few records today…i will run the technics thru a pioneer mixer then into either the line in jack on the laptop or the line in on the desktop…generic sound car
is either one better than the other?
i will record using soundforge…
any tips to offer?
give plenty of head room, try to record @ 48hz, make sure the vinyl is static free and clean of any dirty, grim and junk.
Damn, both options aren’t ideal and you’ll color the sound with the mixer, but that’s all you got in the way of inputs, so I’d say record a few seconds of silence on both (after adjusting the input levels to be similar) and do everything on whichever pc has the least noisy sound card.
if you intend on running any plugins (noise reduction etc…) and your hardware allows it, record at 24bit - recent soundforge versions have a good dithering plugin to take it all down to 16bit later and the extra bits of info will be useful.
I myself don’t use anything and just clean up the biggest pops with Soundforge’s repair options (like copy from other channel/interpolate) or just copy/paste a similar segment taken a few beats around.
You may notice a slight loss in the high end, if so run process>Smooth/enhance and enhance at maybe +2 or +3.
thank you both…
also if you have a audio 4/6/8 i would record it straight from the turntable>audio8>soundforge
just an audio2…
Use the Audio 2.
Audio 2 is output only, isn’t it?
sure is
Oh, sorry, didn’t know this. Assumed it had phono in.
Hi.
I record directly from my DJ Mixer (I use a mixing board for Traktor) since I am accustomed to playing vinyl through that mixer since 1988.
The tone controls are configured in a flat position in which, I send the signal to Samplitude recording @ 88.2 kHz, 24-bit.
I have a few M-Audio Audiophile 24-bit/96 kHz & 24-bit/192 kHz soundcards, which I use for my DAW (Samplitude) and DJ computers (Traktor).
Recording levels are set low (Peaks – 20 dB) to have ample headroom.
Once the recording is completed, I’ll add a little gain and, fade the ending. I want the wav files to sound exactly like the vinyl recording so I do not alter anything. 
Cheers!
would i be better off running the turntable straight into a sony receiver instead of the mixer?
Possibly ! If I were in your shoes, again, I’d A/B test both options and go for the cleanest.
If you feel the Sony Receiver will do a better job, by all means.
As bumtsch suggested, why not try both methods.