Saturday, January 31, 2015

02 Digitizing records – the basics, and Audacity program

You will need a turntable (record player) to play the record, a music system or amplifier to output sound, and a computer or laptop to input the sound into a program that can record it in digital format and save as it as a computer file. You will need the appropriate audio cable (wires) to connect the turntable to the music system or amplifier, and the amplifier to the computer. You will need to have the software program loaded on the computer and running to record the sound. These are the minimum tools. A cat is optional, but highly recommended (you need someone to blame, and it’s not a good idea assigning that role to the spouse,  siblings, or parents).
Let’s deal with the software first, because without it you may not be able to record the sound. In my experience, there is no need to look beyond Audacity, a free-ware program that does pretty much everything you could think of (at least as far as I am concerned!), and then some. Just go to the site http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ and browse… the latest version for download is Audacity 2.0.6, released September 2014. It has downloads http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/ for Windows (2000/XP/Vista/ Windows 7/Windows 8), Mac (Universal Binary for Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.9.x) and source code (for GNU/Linux). The best thing about it is not just that it’s free and open-source, but that it has such a delightful use interface and menu system. While you’re at it, download the LAME mp3 encoding library, http://manual.audacityteam.org/help/manual/man/faq_installation_and_plug_ins.html#lame

so that you can seamlessly output to mp3 files (other formats are also available).


So the first thing to do is to download this program and install it, browse the website, and play around with it.   

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