Vinyl records to CD or iTunes – Analog to Digital Amadeus Pro

There are quite a few of us old dinosaurs around that still have vinyl LP records, possibly a couple of EP records and maybe even the odd single. I know that I have one or two vinyl albums around, from too many years ago that I care to mention. You have to decide whether you want to go down one of three routes. You can either buy the songs again in iTunes , just forget about listening to that old music again, or maybe you can decide to convert those songs into digital.

 

If you don’t have too many of those albums that you want to get into digital format, then maybe the best option is to just buy those songs again. Another reason why this might be the best option is if you don’t like to listen to the clicks, pops and crackles that you get from dragging a needle in a groove at 33 rpm. I do know that there are some people that like this, as it gives a certain feeling of authenticity.

You could of course do a bit of a mix and match, by re-buying some of the best songs in the digital format, assigning one of two songs to a forgotten history and maybe using some hardware and software to convert some of the favourites.

The hardware and software needed to do the job

It may well be that you have an old record player that still has a good needle in it and also has a way that you can connect a lineout from it to your computer. If this is not the case then you might want to invest in buying a USB turntable. What you could do is to convert all of your LPs and then sell on that USB turntable, once you don’t need it any more.

Splitting your sides

So then you need some software to deal with the problem of splitting the tracks of each side of the album into separate files. When you make your recording, you will record an LP to the A-side and the B-side recording tracks. Software such as Amadeus Pro can be set up so that it will automatically find the tracks based upon the silence in between songs. This is not always successful and sometimes you find there are moments of silence within a song which will confuse the software. With there not being that many tracks on one side of an album, I find that it is quite easy usually to look as the waveform in the software and see where each song starts. Also with Amadeus Pro it is possible to add the markers that you use to split the track up while the song is playing. All you have to do is to press one key on your keyboard to insert the marker and you even get the opportunity to add the name of the song as the name of the marker.

Amadeus Pro Tutorial – Vinyl to CD or iTunes

Here in this video I show you how you can use Amadeus Pro converting your recorded album sides into separate songs. It is really quite easy for you to add the meta data for the album, so that when the songs are split up they will all have the name of the artist and the name of the album as well as each individual song title. If you love your music, then you’ll probably find it worthwhile to spend the time doing a proper job of the conversion from analogue to digital of your old vinyl albums.