Complete B&F digital downloads

[Ranking Glasses]

I think there was a choice on the conversion website I was recommended. I'm a dinosaur so other people will be better to explain better than me. I naively downloaded 3 tunes before realising it was illegal so I promptly deleted them.

[Benj65]

Yes, the You Tube video soundtracks will usually be compromised sound wise by the low bit rate (small file size = less data = less music), so what one might actually do with a download in terms of pleasurable listening beats the hell out of me.

I only v occasionally use it as a reference resource for reggae tunes mentioned by other people, in the same way I glanced at a Wikipedia page this morning when my sister was talking about being in Bagan - where the hell is that? - once I looked it up I recognized it as the famous valley of those golden-domed Buddhist temples in Myanmar.

So, IMHO, there isn't much point in NOT doing the digitizing yourself as it will preserve the quality of the original which we all love, right? It isn't that difficult or expensive to do, but it does take TIME.

On the other hand, as my 14 yo son points out, not that many people are bothered by the trade off between convenience and sound quality, so I am probably talking Jack.

[John Eden]

I've thought about this quite a lot and my conclusion has been to hold on.

I don't have time to listen to enough music right now let alone muck about with digitisation.

Things that will probably happen in the next 10 years:

1. The quality of streamed or downloadable music will increase as demand and bandwidth increases
2. There will be a public, collective (re)uploading of music to sites like Youtube as part of this.
3. There could also be private, collective, digitisation communities that can share the load and cut down on time.
4. Failing all that, the hardware and software for personal digitisation should get easier to use.

[ReggaeFire]

I doubt 1 and 2, as 256 aac/320 mp3 are pretty standard now and are good sounding.

3 already exists in the form of many illicit torrent sites. One can easy argue against their morality, but really, the analog stuff that is available on some of them is impressive.

4 is also starting to come out, as Guillaume mentioned the new Sugarcube seems very promising, though the price is going to keep it out of the hand of many. If such a thing dropped in price by a factor of 10 I would guess it would make many vinyl people take notice.


I'm just completing my vinyl modest digitization project, about 750 LPs and 600 singles done so far, I've got another 500 singles to go. I am lucky in that I have a job where I can do it at the office. Each LP takes me about an hour, the singles about 20 minutes each (the clean up process takes only a bit longer for LPs than singles). I've been at it for maybe 6 months and expect to be done by April.

[John Eden]

I doubt 1 and 2, as 256 aac/320 mp3 are pretty standard now and are good sounding.

It will go higher!!!

It's fun to make predictions. Youtube sound quality is still pretty bad and I would be amazed if there wasn't an attempt at doing a more HD version, possibly for subscribers or with more ads or something.

Also Spotify sounds like rubbish to me but that might just be my daughter's taste in music.

Apparently Itunes insists that people upload music to their store at very high quality so they have all this stuff sitting there and I assume are waiting on a time when they can relaunch it all and try to make people buy it all AGAIN in a slightly different format.

If people have the time to digitise their stuff and/or they just enjoy noodling about and doing that stuff that's cool. I do think there is a huge duplication of effort going on there though.

[Benj65]

Yeah, I did a test last year on my mates Spotify running through Sonos vs a wav file ripped through iTunes played on an iPod and then into the Sonos (Gregory Isaacs - The Fugitive) and it was quite noticeable how poor the Spotify version sounded. Not claiming it was a scientific test or anything, but it put me off for the forseeable.

[Benj65]

Incidentally Mr Eden, why are you using a picture of me as your avatar???

[John Eden]

Incidentally Mr Eden, why are you using a picture of me as your avatar???

It’s a portrait by a young friend of mine - perhaps she was inspired by you though?

[Benj65]

Must have been a few years ago, I haven't got that much hair these days!

[guillaumebougard]

I doubt 1 and 2, as 256 aac/320 mp3 are pretty standard now and are good sounding.

3 already exists in the form of many illicit torrent sites. One can easy argue against their morality, but really, the analog stuff that is available on some of them is impressive.

4 is also starting to come out, as Guillaume mentioned the new Sugarcube seems very promising, though the price is going to keep it out of the hand of many. If such a thing dropped in price by a factor of 10 I would guess it would make many vinyl people take notice.


I'm just completing my vinyl modest digitization project, about 750 LPs and 600 singles done so far, I've got another 500 singles to go. I am lucky in that I have a job where I can do it at the office. Each LP takes me about an hour, the singles about 20 minutes each (the clean up process takes only a bit longer for LPs than singles). I've been at it for maybe 6 months and expect to be done by April.

a good alternative to Sugarcube is ClickRepair and related apps DeNoise and DeNoiseLF
the suite costs $40 and one can pretty much decide the cleaning settings very finely, and even go fully manual: there is an option where the app stops at every click and prompts the user to decide if the user wants to remove the clik or not
that optiuon is a bit too time consuming especially since Jamaican records are already so click-y and pop-y!

[kalcidis]

Do they offer a lot more than Audacity or why wouldn't one clean the clicks in that (free) software instead?

I've dabbled a bit in vinyl/digital transfer but never done it properly so quite curious to how people do their rips. I do want to start sorting it out for myself so I don't have to listen to crappy mp3's of some of the albums I have and can't source in satisfactory digital quality.

[ReggaeFire]

I use the ClickRepair and Denoise applications for all my rips. Clickrepair is great, I'm lazy and mostly use the automatic feature, adjusted slightly for the type of music, state of the record, etc. I'm quite happy with the results. Denoise is more of a mystery to me, to be honest. I know if used properly it can do some new stuff, but I can't get my head around how to actually use it.

Instead of Audacity, I use a (Mac) program called VinylStudio. I like it because it queries Discogs to download the tracklisting automatically, so it really streamlines the tagging process. I record the album and it splits the tracks and adds the titles. Usually I have to manually adjust the track breaks a tad, but it's much better than the all manual method. The also have some very basic declick/denoise built in. I don't use their declick, but I do tend to favor their denoise on the few records I need to use that on due to simplicity.

[John Eden]

Just bumping this to get past 13 pages of spam

[John Eden]

My predictions are in ruins after a few days

Soundcloud has halved its bitrate for free users:

http://nesthq.com/soundcloud-bitrate-reduction

[JohnnyGunman]

Hi there,

Just putting it out there that I'm more than happy to contribute to any digitizing anyone wants to do/get done.

I'm from the CD generation but I picked up one Vinyl last year with the intention of digitizing it, but I haven't managed to get it done yet. It's The Pioneers Pusher Man album.