I would like to start putting all my CDs & LPs on my computer and need help understanding how to go about this.

1. Given that I want to do LPs in addition to Cds, do I need any special type of soundcard or is M-Audio Revolution 5.1 good enough? I would like to do high quality, but for this and all other aspects of the process, I'm probably not willing to spend tons of extra money and/or time in this pursuit.

2. As mentioned above, I want high quality audio. What are the appropriate file formats to consider? I will be copying both CDs & LPs to disk. I anticipate using the files in the following manner - playing through my computer system, playing on a portable player (likely IPod, but not yet purchased) and creating mix CDs to play on home and car stereo.

3. How much storage space will each CD/LP require for each of the formats I should consider?

4. If I understand the process correctly, I need a program to record the CD/LP to my hard disk and then need to encode the music in the chosen file format. For LPs, it sounds like I will also need something to get rid of clicks & pops. Finally, I need to have some means of organizing the collection once it has been transferred. If I burn CDs, will I need another program to handle that step? What programs are best for these steps? Am I missing anything?

I'll be restricting my comments to the LP side of this. CD ripping is a far more straightforward process and you'll find plenty of advice about it by searching these forums.


The Revolution 5.1 is probably at the low end of "good enough". A slightly better card, such as the M-Audio Audiophile 2496, is certainly good enough to transparently capture any domestic analogue source. I'd start off using the Revolution and see whether you think the recording quality is good enough.

As long as the soundcard is not incompetent, the analogue playback side of things is far more important. Your turntable needs to be properly aligned, the stylus must be in good condition, and above all your LPs must be clean. If you have a large number of LPs to record, it may even be worth investing in a vacuum cleaning machine such as the Nitty-Gritty, VPI, or Moth.


Record your LPs to uncompressed WAV files, using 44.1kHz/16bit. The dynamic range of even the best LP is nowhere near enough to exceed 16bit recording. Using 24bit word lengths does nothing other than consume extra disk space while giving you a psychological warm feeling.

Many of the restoration programs you may want to try only work on WAV files. Leave any kind of compression (lossy or lossless) to a final step, after all the other editing has been done.


44.1kHz/16bit/stereo WAV files consume about 10MB per minute, so a typical LP will require about 400MB.


Just about any audio editor will record to WAV files. Audacity is a good choice for a general purpose editor. As for de-clicking and so on, you'll need to try out some of the audio restoration programs around. My LP-to-CD notes web page discusses some of them, and has some general advice about the whole process of recording and cleaning up LP recordings. Be warned that doing it well can be very time-consuming and requires dedication. Completely automatic restoration tools rarely do a very good job.


Once you've got your WAV files sorted, you can encode to anything you like (FLAC, Ogg, MP3, etc) in the normal way. And once they're encoded, you can of course tag them as per usual. WAV files can't be tagged (well, not in any generally accepted standard way).

Lossless compression is maybe half the size of wav, so 5 MB/minute. Lossy compression (mp3, Ogg, AAC,...) depends on *how* lossy you want. Generally somewhere between 1/2 MB/minute and 1.5 MB/minute.



CD:
Most of the programs you would use to read (called "ripping") songs off your CD's will try to look up your CD from an on-line database and then will automatically tag (label) each file with song name, band, album name, etc.
For ripping I generally use the CD read program from dbpoweramp.
THey have a good suite of programs, mostly free, for ripping, converting, organizing, burning, etc. Good for mix cds as you can queue up songs for burning right from the player's database. Only problem is it can't do zero gap between tracks, so...
For burnnig whole albums I use burnatonce


Records:
Some recording programs have some facility for automatically detecting the gap between tracks, but I haven't found any that really work well, so I record a whole side and split it up manually.
cdwave will record, and is great for manually splitting out tracks. audiograbber can be set up to automatically stop at the end of a side and restart when you start the next side. I would still use CDwave for splitting.
After you've done any editing and converted to some format that supports tags, "The Godfather" can create tags from freedb (online database) if the album is listed.

Format: For LP's I generally keep a copy in a lossless compressed format like Flac because it is more work to re-rip than with a CD.

Either way, (CD or LP) if I am planning to burn a copy I would keep it in lossless until that is done.

For portable player use I generally use Ogg/vorbis, but I still have a lot in MP3.

Mack70,

Are you who think you are? if not, just ignore me, if so you have the Revo 7.1 not the 5.1.

The spec's look a little better on the 7.1. It's not worth buying to replace 5.1

Check newegg.com if you choose to buy another card. The m-audio delta 410 is on sale for less than $100. PcI interface, not usb.

The 410 does 24/96. It has 2 analog in (female rca) 8 analog out. There is a break-out cable with analog connectors so check the pictures to see.

there is an audiophile for a bit more, the spec's look about the same and it does not have as many outs (I could be wrong. Some of the audiophile get a lot more expensive with digital in/out. This isn't really necessary for your purposes.

I'm not sure if line-in compared to the analog in will make a difference in quality.

So it seems the way to do things is to rip CDs/LPs to WAV format first and do any cleanup/tweaking/editing, then save the file in a lossless format. I'm assuming that the term lossless format means that there is no acoustic difference between these files and the original WAV? Are there any important differences between lossless formats? Will I be able to make files that will work on a portable player from a lossless format, or do I have to create two different files from the original WAV?

Lossless is entirely optional. You could just keep the WAVs. If you plan on making audio format CDs for playing on normal CD players, WAV is the desired source format. But you can always reconstruct the WAVs from the lossless encodings if you need to.

The advantages of going for a lossless encoding is that it'll take up less storage space (you'll save perhaps 40%-50%), and you can tag them. Subsequent transcodings to lossy formats for portable use is much simpler if the source files are already tagged.

Correct. The point of a lossless encoding is that, when decoded, you get an identical audio stream to the original WAV file. I don't know much about all the competing lossless formats, but FLAC seems to be the one most used. At least you'll be sure that it'll never be subject to licencing issues. The other one I've used is Monkey's Audio, which seems to give slightly better compression ratios, but it's not so widely supported (eg. my Rio Karma and Squeezebox both support FLAC, but not Monkey's).

Yes, once you're in a tagged lossless format, transcoding to any lossy format (eg. MP3, Ogg, etc) can be automated. Foobar2K is your friend in this respect.

Other than the larger file size, it seems the drawback to WAV is the lack/poor tagging system. How big a problem is this to overcome if I want to create portable files from a WAV library? Would it be easier to recreate the WAV files from a lossless format for doing mix CDs?

Thanks for all the help!

The burn programs I use work fine with lossless flac files instead of wav. Of course the program has to uncompress the data to build the disk image. If you burn from a tagged format then the program should be able to extract the song titles etc for CD-text.

If you keep your files as wav for playing on the computer then you also lose the benefits of tags there, like display and selecting songs by tag. Creating partial tags (artist, album, song title) on the spot when making lossy files for your portable isn't too bad .. just an extra step.. providing you store the files in directories with the right names
(artist/album/song) so the tagging program can extract the info. You would still be missing other tags like genre and year.

Bottom line is there isn't really much reason to keep wav files around once you are done editing. They take more space and are just plain not as functional as lossless compressed.