I have done a search, and cannot find a definitive answer anywhere. Please some HELP!
The Vinyl System is a Pink Triangle PT1, J7 rewired, new bearings, RB300 arm, and a Dynavector 10x5 cartridge. All looked after by #Cymbiosis
Pre amp is a Stageline connecting to a NAC282.
The tape output from the 282 is then connected to a Tascam DR05x, recording 96Khz/24bit, a battery operated recorder.
Without spending a lot of money I don’t have, I doubt there is much more I could do to improve the front end.
My question is about the software on the PC.
Audacity seems to be a popular choice, probably because it is free.
Adobe Audition is another piece of software that I have free access to as part of the Adobe suite that I have, although I do pay for it on a monthly subscription.
Do people have experiences using the Adobe software?
Do people have a preference?
I do not want advice about system upgrades, but for completeness, I am currently using a NAP200, which will be upgraded to a NAP250DR very soon, and Kudos X3’s with KS1 speaker cables.
There are plenty of YouTube clips about Audacity, but not so many on Adobe, which appears to have features such as click removal, sound leveling, auto-denoise, etc.
Reason, for doing this task, LP’s can be damaged when I had a beer, I can stream my music around the house, preserve my LP’s.
I used VinylStudio, does a great job including sorting album into tracks, metadata and album art. It is paid for but there is a demo version available. Made digitising around 1000 albums about as painless as it ever could be.
It seems useful, but then Adobe will do most of the same stuff, although not as conveniently as a simple click. It is useful that it handles DSD, although it makes no reference to being able to convert a PCM file to DSD, a format that I prefer. I understand it is like marmite, some love it, others cannot stand it. I use Roon to catalouge and play my RIP’s and stream. A DSD ADC is out of the question, unless the correct balls drop out of the machine.
@Innocent_Bystander I am aware of the process, I am asking about the software, Audacity might be free, but it is a case of having to listen for each click, and removing it manually. The recordings are going to be in 96/24 resolution, it is how I edit and remove clicks, and what the best software is to do that task. Thank you for the advice, as I previously stated, the need to digitise my vinyl is a matter of listening to albums that are not on streaming services, and maybe out of town using Roon ARC.
Some people like to play with this sort of thing, which is fine. For me it seemed like a bit of a faff and after doing a few albums I decided it was far easier to buy the albums I really wanted to listen to on CD and rip them. These were older albums nearly all of which were available on CD for under £5, and quite often only £1 or 2. That’s money I recouped by selling the LPs, mostly for more than the cost of the CDs that replaced them.
As my linked detail indicated, Audacity can automatically remove clicks/pops, and depending on the specific clicks that can work well - but I found it didn’t work for all on my records and I found ways to do manually to cope with anything if the auto didn’t. And you don’t listen for clicks - you can see anything of significance clearly on the screen and jump rapidly from one to the next, or can then play just those few seconds to verify if unsure.
Hopefully someone can answer your question, however I suspect the number of people actually comparing the process across different software packages are few and far between. I assume you’ve hunted for any comparative reviews?
I’m not a fan of click removal. I find that files of vinyl recordings sound much better and more natural (vinyl-like?) with minimal post-production applied.
When I did all my 12 inch and 7 inch singles I used Garage Band with nice results but I only wanted copies for use when out and about or for club use by dj friends rather than absolute quality.
I was doing this back in the late 90’s with my rega planar 3 into the sound card of the pc - I must have used some sort of amp.
Then using a programme similar to Audacity to chop up the tracks and file away.
It is good fun but ultimately most of the albums I digitised became available on CD - just a couple of Annette Peacock albums that have yet to be re-released remain in this form and sound pretty good.
FWIW I didn’t find any tools usefulotger than click removal. And doing myself I couldn’t detect anything as tge music played (unlike when the click was there!).
Sadly, my 12" singles are hard to find, even on streaming services, and some LP’s I have are not available anywhere, even on streaming services. I can do a free trial of vinylstudio, i might try three programs and decide from there. Thank you for your thoughts
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A friend uses an old Korg MR1 to get the capture in single-bit DSD format, then Korg audiogate to get from dsd to pcm, then Audacity to split into individual tracks and label them.
We found post-processing for click-removal was best avoided if replaying on high-end system, as it added a hardness and lost details.
Higher bitrates sounded better - music type dependent, but I liked the 24/192 on many of my favorites from Vinyl-rips, but mostly 24/96 got the right result. The good thing about capturing in one-bit DSD is you can experiment with different final version files from the one master to find what you prefer.
Just one way to do it.
We also found turning off everything not needed while doing the capture from Vinyl makes a big difference and well-worth doing. No speakers and we went to the limit of most other items in the house and just having the turntable and pre running - but certainly turn the speakers off.
I wonder how removing clicks could add hardness, as only the noise pulses are treated, nothing at all affecting any other part of the track. (Rhetorical question). Losing detail, yes but detail was lost under the click! Maybe if auto is used with too sensitive a threshold it would interpret sharp musical attacks as clicks (but that is just speculation).
My own way of processing depended on the length of the noise pulse, and what came before/after. E.g. in some cases I deleted the pulse and lengthened the preceding sound by the fraction of a second to fill the space, others where the sound before and after were identical and the period very short I simply deleted, where the pulse was particularly big, as from a more significant scratch, there was a risk of the repair being audible -but far less so than the pulse
We tried it A-B with and without removal - and also tried various degrees of severity of how it can be tuned to be removed and they all were worse IMO. The clicks were gone, but also what made it an involving piece of music, because in doing the digital processing the whole signal was altered in order to remove the clicks - and that added extra distortion at low-levels masking detail that was there before.
If you can just remove the clicks then I would want that but it is how it is done in the software that is important. Probably over-sampling and having a far higher bit-depth then down-sampling later may have got better results. It may be possible to do it better, but not just with the free software running on a computer is what I found.
In the end I listen to it and I know what was better - I kept the clicks in preference to it processed to remove them.
This is pretty much what I found. Recording at 24bit 96kHz I found that keeping any post production to an absolute minimum (just cutting the tracks) was far and away the best sounding option and kept much of the original “feel” of the original vinyl or reel tape.
