Thanks for the great comments about vinyl digitalizing. Hopefully they’ve been as helpful for other digitalizers as they’ve been to me. With the help of the almighty Google and the opinions shared, I’ve finally reached a certain routin – or workflow – with the digitalizing process. It means, by following a simple step-by-step workflow the speed and quality of digitalizing has improved a lot.
The following vinyl digitalizing method is done with Ableton Live, iTunes and Audacity.
1) Connect your vinyl player to the mixer and the mixer to the computer.
2) Start Ableton live. Save your empty project on your desktop with any preferred name. Ableton Live automatically creates a folder “Your_Project Sounds” where Your_Project represents the name with which you just saved your project.
3) Record your vinyls. One vinyl per Clip Slot. Your can make more Tracks on Ableton, but make sure you record only one vinyl per one Clip Slot.
4) Once done, save your project and close Ableton. Don’t export anything.
5) Go to the “Your_Project Sounds” folder. The vinyls you just recorded are there as .wav files. No exporting needed.
6) Open .wav files on Audacity, remove gaps before and after the track, normalize if needed and export as .wav.
7) Drag the ready .wav files to iTunes, convert to Apple Lossless and tag like there’s no tomorrow.
8) Bang, you’re ready. If you want to use your iTunes as an archive for your tracks, leave them there and delete the original imported .wavs. If not, drag the converted files to a preferred folder (the tags are transferred within the files).
If you have any comments or improvement tips, let me/us know.
The other entries about vinyl digitalizing are here, here and here.