Recording Vinyl using Traktor

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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Recording Vinyl using Traktor

I just got a hold of Traktor Scratch Pro and I was told I can record my vinyl collection and then convert to mp3’s. Any advice on how to do this? Thanks!

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What hardware are you using?

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Download Audacity (free)

Plug in your Traktor Soundcard + Turntable

Open Audacity and select the respective sound card input (one your turntable is connected to) as record.

Press record > Play Track > Press Stop.

Export as Wav somewhere!

Now you can do one of two things..

  1. Throw all your Files into an itunes playlist, highlight them and use the “Convert to MP3” function

  2. Do a “Batch Process” and export the entire folders contents in Audacity as mp3 (file menu).

You might wonder why I’m suggesting you just save as Wav first and not export as MP3.

  1. To save the highest quality file as a backup for the future.
  2. You can run a batch to convert everything to mp3 overnight or when you are away from the computer.

BTW I’d suggest checking out if any of your vinyl tracks are already available as mp3’s, I don’t know what your time is worth but I do know that a Vinyl ripping is seriously time consuming and I wouldn’t bother except the tracks are totally unavailable from a 99c online store e.g. itunes / amazon

E.g. 10 regular vinyl recordings = Appx 1.5 hours to rip + computer down time converting to mp3/aac.

1 hour of my time is worth more than the $10 I’ll spend buying the same tracks pre-ripped (and probably better quality) from itunes.

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It looks like deevey brought up a great suggestion. Downloading “Audacity”. I by the way thought I could do this with just Traktor Pro and 2 turntables but I guess I was wrong.

Thanks OmniRoss.

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Thanks for the reply and advice. And you’re right! It makes more sense to just spend $0.99 per track than to spend all that time ripping vinyl. I thought I’d be able to do all this with just Traktor and 2 turntables. I’ll keep Audacity in mind just in case.

Thanks again deevey!

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You can do it just with Traktor, just for reference.

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Quite right you are. I just don’t trust Traktors “coloring” of the Audio signal.

You’ll also need to slice everything afterwards anyhow though.

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I doubt there is any colouring if the eq is flat and fx are off

I hear you on slice up anyway though

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And auto gain is off…

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Not sure auto gain is a factor with line inputs… maybe tho yeah :slight_smile:

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fwiw, I’d get hold of the flac plugin for audacity as well - means your finished files are losslessly encided and take up a lot less space than wavs.

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If you own the vinyl (original), then you can legally download the file “illegally”.

NB. This is only true in some countries.

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ok - so here’s another related question I’m hoping someone can help me with. Recently I’ve finally moved to the digital age - bought myself a Vestax VCI 400 which I thought was the best option as it has that standalone mixer function for when I want to play vinyl as opposed to digital files. I’ve a little problem - when ripping vinyl with Audacity - using the mixer’s output - for some reason I cannot get deck D to work. I can hear the music playing - and see the signal on the D channel. Why on earth would only the C channel work?