On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Jim Cheetham wrote: > Do any of you guys have a working setup with a vinyl record player > hooked up as an input source for an ogg or mp3 encoder?
I've done it once before for a friend. Hardware wise, you need a record player and a pre-amp as well as your computer. Some recent record players (I've seen one, at Dick Smith) come with a pre-amp built in. The others do not do any amplification of the sound they pick up from the needle, which is why they output at such a low level. This is why you can unplug a record player, put the needle down and manually turn the record. It'll work (at the wrong speed tho). I think you can buy a pre-amp kit from Dick Smith as well. Turntable mixers have them built in. Any amplifier with a dedicated "record" input has one built in. If you're using a standard amplifier to do the pre-amp stuff you'll need that amp to have RCA output...or perhaps take the signal from a headphone socket (but you might get crappy quality, and won't be able to hear the track when it's playing. When I did it I used an old turntable and a DJ mixer. Software wise, I used the command-line utility "rec". Gnome has a sound recording program that I've had no end of problems with...all the defaults are set to stupid values (like a 5 min max recording time, and using /tmp for tempory file storage.../tmp on my system is a ram drive). gramphone is supposed to be the best for doing this. It can automatically detect bumps in your record and modify the sound accordingly. It can also detect when your record player isn't spinning at a constant speed, and fix that as well. > I have a number of "real" records (about 10 or so) that I'd like to have > a digital copy of ... mmm. me to. Someone gave me 2000 records a month ago. Tim Wright Assistant Lecturer Department of Computer Science University of Canterbury http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~tnw13
