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Note
Our grading system is not based on any agreed standard nor on anyone else's idea of quality. It is used only as a guide.
It roughly means as follows:
Fair
Fairly well played over the years but on a Goldring deck and always treated with care. It still plays, but there is bound to be substantial wear if you use an electron microscope. There might be slight surface noise noticeable without filters. The sleeve will likewise be in 'worn' condition. We are not offering for sale any records which are not playable.
Good
Better than fair but still played quite a bit. Likely to be in pretty good condition and reasonably clean.
Excellent
Much as good, but played a lot less and looking and playing much cleaner. Sleeve generally in pretty good condition.
Near mint
Played, but hardly at all, up to half a dozen times at most. Sleeve in perfect condition.
Mint
Mostly not played at all, or only once. As close as the condition of a newly bought record as is possible.
Transferring LPs to CDR: Some Advice
Preliminaries
This page of notes is a distillation of my experiences in transferring LPs to CDR. I offer it as hopefully unbiased advice to others wishing to do the same thing. I have attempted to address the whole process at a reasonably deep level. Some parts of it are bound to be of no interest to some readers; I hope the sections are obvious enough that you can skip those parts which don't apply to you.
My standards are high. I have a stereo system which all but a small minority of audiophile extremists would regard as "very high end". I'm not interested in putting anything onto a CDR unless I can get fairly close to perfection. The advice contained in these notes is empirical, and results from my own personal experiences.
I am not a digital audio professional. Transferring LPs to CDR is my hobby, born of the desire to preserve those parts of my LP collection which (i) are unavailable on CD, or (ii) aren't essential enough to me to be worth spending the money replacing them on CD.
I work on a PC, and can only offer advice in that arena. I have no knowledge whatsoever of doing this kind of work on Macs or Unix machines.
I get quite a few email enquiries from people who have found this page, and some questions tend to be asked repeatedly. They aren't directly relevant to the task of transferring LP to CDR, but are more general about audio on a PC. Therefore I've put together a separate page (Clive's FAQ) to answer these. Before emailing me with a question about audio on a PC, please check this page to see if it's answered there.
Obviously I can't write down everything I've ever discovered about this process, so if you have any other specific questions, feel free to email me. But before you do, I would ask you to check the FAQ carefully to see if your question is already answered there. Please also note that changes in my circumstances mean that I will not be able to respond to emails as quickly as I have done in the past, but I will try to continue to help wherever I can.
And finally, a disclaimer about Adaptec/Roxio software. I sometimes receive emails asking for help regarding the Adaptec/Roxio products Easy CD Creator and Spin Doctor. As far as I can make out, it is possible to get to this page via links that start on Roxio's website, and so some people arrive here under the mistaken impression that I am in some way connected to Adaptec/Roxio. Let me make my position clear. I have absolutely no connection to Adaptec/Roxio. I have evaluated both Easy CD Creator and Spin Doctor in the past, but do not use either of them and am unable to offer specific advice about them.
At the end of this document is a list of useful links. (I will just point out that I do not read German, so cannot comment on the content of Joerg Eisentraeger's site).
Slightly off-topic: why use a computer?: I got some email from someone who asked me to add a short paragraph discussing alternative methods of archiving LPs without using a computer, so I have done so at the end of these notes.
Overview
Recording the LP to Hard Disk
Clean the LP
If you don't have access to a vacuum machine, and the record is very dirty, then I've recently tried out a fluid from Australia known as The Vinyl Solution which is inexpensive and works well on very dirty records. I have to say that I do not know what is in this fluid, and so cannot take responsibility for any long-term effects it may have on the vinyl. I suspect, but cannot say with any certainty, that it may have the same alleged drawbacks as wet playing, but if all you want is to make one good transfer of an LP and can't afford to invest in a vacuum cleaner, it seems like a good approach.
Playing the LP
A turntable is a mechanical device which is vulnerable to airborne and floorborne vibrations. Such vibrations can degrade the playback quality quite noticably. Even the very best turntables can suffer in this respect. Therefore, while recording the LP, keep surrounding sound levels as low as possible. Ideally you should not use any kind of monitoring at all; don't worry about knowing when the music starts and ends, just start recording from before placing the stylus on the lead-in groove and continue recording right into the run-out groove (trimming off these extra bits later is easy).
The Need for a Preamp
I see that a few companies, including Stanton and Denon, make turntables that have built-in phono preamps, and a few even have SPDIF digital outputs. That said, these are DJ type turntables, which tend to be built for ruggedness and reliability rather than outright sound quality.
How about "wet playing"?
Other people have different views as to why wet playing works. There is a school of thought that it's not really anything to do with lifting dirt into suspension, but rather that it alters the damping of the stylus and/or allows the stylus to aquaplane over minor imperfections.
I should also report that some people state that wet playing actually damages the groove wall. The argument is as follows. When you play an LP, the (hard) diamond stylus deforms the (soft) vinyl groove. When played normally (ie. dry), the friction causes the vinyl to heat up, which allows it to deform and return to its original shape after a while. If, however, the LP is played wet, the fluid acts as a coolant which prevents the deformation, allowing the stylus instead to carve slivers of vinyl off the groove walls.
Others have reported that wet playing can cause a kind of sludge (ie. the dirt from the LP suspended in the liquid) to accumulate on the stylus. This would then dry and harden, be very difficult to clean off, and cause subsequent mistracking. I've not noticed this myself, but would guess that the scale of this problem would be affected by how dirty the LP is, the exact composition of the liquid used, and how highly polished the stylus is.
I have experimented with wet playing, and it does indeed reduce some (but by no means all) forms of surface noise. There are a number of issues, though:
- What liquid should be used? You certainly must not use tap water, as it is full of contaminents. Distilled water is the obvious base liquid, but it is not a particularly good solvent, and so any dirt which is stuck to the grooves is unlikely to be lifted. Adding an amount of alcohol can help matters here, but it tends to evaporate off the LP surface before the side has finished playing; closing the turntable lid while playing may help reduce the evaporation rate.
- After playing an LP wet, the dirt in suspension drops back into the grooves at very inconvenient places. This results in the surface noise being significantly increased if you subsequently play the record dry. Therefore, after playing a record wet, you really need to continue to play it wet thereafter.
- The most successful wet-play method I've ever come across is a product called "Lencoclean", which tracks the LP like a second pickup arm, applying the solution locally to just that part being played. I haven't used it for over 20 years now, but it is still available. Lenco have a website (in German), but it's a little difficult to navigate, and the last time I visited it I couldn't find Lencoclean mentioned anywhere. An online store that can supply Lencoclean is Conrad Electronics.
I must point out that I have no authoritative knowledge about wet playing, but feel that if I discuss it at all, it is important to mention all the opinions of which I am aware.
Recording to Hard Disk
The standard Sound Recorder utility that comes with Windows is not suitable for this task because it records to main RAM and only writes the results to hard disk when recording finishes. This means that recording time is limited by the amount of RAM in the PC; since 16 bit stereo at 44kHz uses about 10MB per minute, there's no way you'll be able to record an entire LP side using Sound Recorder. What is needed is a utility that can record direct to the hard disk. There are a large number of such utilities available as shareware. My own shareware Wave Repair supports hard disk recording, has rather better record level metering than most other packages, and if used as a simple record utility it is freeware. Of the other packages around, the cheapest two I am aware of are CD Wave and RIP Vinyl. Another fairly straightforward and inexpensive recording package is PolderbitS. Although I've not had a chance to evaluate it properly, a number of users are very impressed by it, so for that reason it is worth a mention. Two very good general purpose WAV file editors, CoolEdit 2000 and GoldWave, also offer direct to hard disk recording.
Discussion of Soundcard Types
- Use a "normal" computer soundcard. You need a soundcard capable of 44.1kHz 16bit stereo. All modern soundcards are able to do this. The (analogue) line level signal should be fed into the line input of the soundcard, and the signal can then be recorded straight to the hard disk.
- Use an outboard analogue-to-digital convertor, and feed its (digital) output into a soundcard capable of receiving digital signals. As with using a "normal" soundcard, the analogue signal must be sampled at 44.1kHz stereo. If you use an A/D convertor which is capable of more than 16 bit resolution, you might wish to find a soundcard that can maintain those bits (although you will of course have to convert to 16 bit before actually burning a CDR). However, my own experience is that even the most perfect of LP sources will be hard pressed to deliver a signal with more than 12 bits resolution, so plain vanilla 16 bit is fine, and even truncation without redithering won't harm the LP signal.
- Cheap cards with unknown brand names. It is of course possible that some of these may be fine, but in general they have fairly dreadful sound quality. Avoid.
- Low end PCI-bus Soundblasters. The old ISA-bus Soundblasters were frankly not very good, but the more recent PCI-bus offerings are much better. An OEM version of the PCI128 can be had for about $30, and has quite reasonable sound quality. The noise floor is about -65dB (although of course this might be influenced by the particular motherboard in use), which is better than you'll get off even the best LP played on a high-end turntable, and the frequency response is perhaps a little bright but otherwise not bad at all. Note that the PCI128 has recently been replaced by the PCI512, and there are reports that the 512 has marginally worse sound quality than the 128.
- Mainstream cards in the sub-$200 range, such as the Soundblaster Live, Turtle Beach Montego II, and similar. These cards tend to have much more sophisticated extra features for game support, sound effects and multi-channel surround sound, but their basic sound quality is usually no better than cards like the PCI128. An exception seems to be the recently introduced Turtle Beach Santa Cruz: although I've never used one, technical reviews consistently report that its raw sound quality is a notch above the Soundblaster Live. I have also seen reports that some of the Terratec range are good performers, but I have no personal experience of them.
- Serious cards aimed at the semi-professional, such as the Echo Gina, LynxOne, and DAL CardDeluxe. These typically cost around $400-$500, and can give sound quality as good as entry-level external A/D converters.
www.pcavtech.com/soundcards/index.htm has a lot of good information about analogue soundcards.
As for soundcards which can receive a digital signal, there are a host of options:
- The cheapest I know of that's widely available is the Midiman DiO2448, with a typical price under $150.
- There is another card called the Zoltrix Nightingale which uses the same chipset as the DiO2448 which supports SPDIF I/O and has a price under $40. However there are two drawbacks: (i) it's very hard to actually find one; (ii) it only has optical (Toslink) input, although there is a simple DIY modification to add COAX input.
- Most of the higher-end analogue soundcards such as the Gina, LynxOne and CardDeluxe also have digital I/O capabilities.
- A couple of older Turtle Beach ISA-bus cards, the Fiji and Pinnicle, have daughter board options to provide SPDIF I/O and are known to work well, but may be getting difficult to acquire now that they are out of production.
- Three inexpensive mainstream cards can have an SPDIF daughter board added: Turtle Beach Montego II, Creative Soundblaster Live, and Hootech ST Digital XG. However, all three resample the SPDIF input to an onboard clock rate, so they do not allow for bit-perfect transfer of external digital audio to the hard disk.
- I personally use a Midiman Audiophile 2496, which can be had for under $200 and which has excellent analogue I/O (not that far off the quality of cards like the CardDeluxe) as well as bit-perfect SPDIF I/O.
- And finally, you may hear stories about $20 soundcards with SPDIF I/O. Various people have tested these cards and in the vast majority of cases could not make the SPDIF I/O work properly. Even those few people who did have success needed to build extra bits of circuitry.
www.digitalexperience.com/cards.html has a lot of good information about digital soundcards.
As for the outboard A/D converters themselves, I don't really have a lot of experience in this area, but can report that some low cost converters which have good reputations are the Midiman Flying Calf (about $200), the Lucid ADA1000 (about $500), the Symetrix 620 (an old design at about $600, still highly regarded and something of a de-facto standard in semi-pro studios), and the Lucid AD9624 (about $800). Above this we start to get into serious professional territory, and I'm not qualified to offer advice at that level.
An Alternative Approach that By-Passes the Soundcard
- The A/D converters in audio CD recorders aren't at all bad. They are typically better than the converters on mainstream soundcards like the SB Live and Montego II. (They are not as good as the converters on cards like the DAL CardDeluxe, LynxOne, etc).
- Since the CD recorder isn't inside the PC, any possibility of noise pickup from other subsystems such as the video card is eliminated.
- The CD recorder can sit alongside your stereo system and record from any of the sources you might wish to transfer (eg. LP, cassette, radio, etc). You don't have the problem of how to hook the stereo up to your PC (which in many homes will be in different rooms).
- The only thing you need the soundcard for now is monitoring your work in progress, and even quite cheap soundcards (eg. $10 SB16 clones) are good enough to identify vinyl damage that needs cleaning up.
Humming Along with the Music
Trying to rectify this kind of hum can be problematic, but a few things to try are:
- Check that all the components in your stereo system and the PC are actually grounded; leaving off a ground can easily cause hum. While checking the grounding of the components, don't forget to check the wiring inside the mains plugs.
- Plug all mains electrical items (ie. all stereo components and the PC) into the same mains outlet, using multiway adapters as necessary. (The power consumption of all these kind of devices is so low that this will not overload the outlet). This forces all the components to share a common ground, which might fix the problem.
- If sharing the same outlet doesn't help, you can try disconnecting the ground connections from some components. Start with the turntable itself. If this doesn't work, check to see if the turntable's connection to the preamp/amp/receiver has a separate ground wire and try the effect of attaching/removing it from the preamp/amp/receiver's grounding post.
- If you still have no luck, try disconnecting the preamp/amp/receiver's ground (both with and without the turntable ground re-connected). However, beware of any dire warnings in the manufacturer's manual about this: in many cases it will be safe, but some components might not have insulated cases.
- Rod Smith tells me that cable TV connections can sometimes cause a ground loop if they are fed into the stereo system. In this case, the simplest solution is to disconnect the cable TV output from the stereo system while recording into the computer.
- George Koulomzin suggests another experiment. If you have mains plugs that can be inserted either way round, try the effect of reversing one or more of them. This alters the relative phase of the mains to the components, and it may cause the hum to cancel out.
- Keith Christensen tells me that if you live very close to an analogue TV transmitter mast, the vertical sync pulses can cause interference that sounds very much like mains hum. Unfortunately I don't know of any solution to this.
- Stores such as Radio Shack sell small transformers known as "ground loop isolators". These can cure some types of hum problem when connected between the stereo system and the computer. One person (Mike, he never told me his surname) discovered that the isolators sold by Radio Shack as "Home/Automotive Ground Loop Isolator" (cat. no. 270-054) introduce a serious cut in the bass. Given their low price, these could simply be high-pass filters rather than transformers (ie. they solve the hum problem by just throwing away all the low frequencies along with the hum). Even if they are transformers, it sounds like they are of insufficient quality to do a good job, so they are not recommended. Unfortunately good quality audio frequency transformers are not cheap.
- If all this fails, then I'm at a loss as to what you might try, short of removing all grounds from all components, bundling them all together and strapping them to a copper pipe buried in the (real) ground!
Setting Record Levels
- It uses the maximum resolution available with the 16 bits. Having said this, since an LP signal manages about 12 bits resolution at best, you could in theory afford to leave a huge headroom (eg. peak around -12dB or even less) without losing resolution.
- (Less obvious but probably more important) If you record at a low level and burn a CDR, you will end up with a CD that plays too quietly in comparison to your other (commercial) CDs. While it is possible to bring the level up using the "normalisation" feature of many WAV file editors, such normalisation is never perfect (the arithmetic that is performed results in rounding errors), and so it is better to avoid this if possible.
Unlike recording to analogue tape (where pushing the signal level well past the nominal maximum level can sometimes be a valid approach) it is absolutely crucial that you never exceed the 0dB level. If you do, the result is digital clipping; an extremely unpleasant-sounding type of distortion.
Track Splitting
Cleaning up the Recording
Mono LPs
However, what if the two channels are sufficiently different that the results are not really acceptable mono? To arrive at two identical channels, there are basically three options:
- Merge the two channels together and duplicate the results to both left and right. You may find that some surface noise cancels slightly this way.
- Duplicate the left or right channel to both channels. This would be appropriate if you decide that one of the two channels is markedly better than the other. The most likely reason this might be the case is when one of the groove walls has worse damage than the other, allowing you to select the channel with less surface noise and/or clicks & pops.
- Some intermediate stage between the two above options, whereby the channels are merged but a weighting is applied so that a greater proportion of one channel is used than the other.
Trimming Out Unwanted Sections and Fading In & Out
Reducing Constant Noise
Many audio editors include a broadband noise reduction feature. They usually operate by first taking a "noise fingerprint" from a region that contains only noise, then removing that noise fingerprint from the music using a process known as "Spectral Subtraction". This process can work well, but for tape hiss can cut out quite a bit of the high frequency programme content. It should also be used in moderation, since it can impart a sort of "metallic, robotic" sound to the music if you use it too enthusiastically.
My opinion is that CoolEdit 2000 has the most sophisticated broadband noise reduction available in an inexpensive product, in that it has a wide range of adjustments. That said, this extra flexibility often doesn't seem to achieve significantly better results than the more basic facilities available elsewhere, but if you're prepared to put in the effort and experiment with different settings it can sometimes deliver slightly better results.
Another package which deserves a mention is DCart. This has a fairly good dynamic noise limiter, which varies the amount of hiss reduction based on the amount of high frequency signal that is present. When there is a lot of high frequency energy, the amount of hiss reduction is small; this takes advantage of the fact that the high frequencies that are present mask the hiss. When there is little high frequency content, the amount of hiss reduction is high, and the loss of what little high frequencies there are isn't very noticable. (This technique is basically similar to the the old Philips "DNL" hiss reduction system, as used on their cassette decks back in the 1970s). It can work remarkably well, especially on "busy" music, although it pumps badly on some kinds of signal (eg. solo piano).
Removing Clicks, Pops and Crackle
Removing these kinds of noises without adversely affecting the music is difficult. There are a number of packages on the market which claim to do so automatically, and their number seems to be growing on an almost daily basis. I have tried the following: DCart, DART Pro, CoolEdit 2000, CoolEdit Pro (a more expensive version of CoolEdit 2000), Sound Forge, Sound Laundry, Spin Doctor (bundled with full versions of Roxio's Easy CD Creator, but absent from most OEM versions that come with CDRW drives), Groove Mechanic, WAVclean, Wave Corrector, Wave Repair (written by me, so take what I say about it with a suitable dose of suspicion). They all suffer from the same basic problem: they sometimes work very well, and other times they actually make things worse.
You can try fiddling with the parameters, but this rarely results in any significant improvement. Some of them (DART Pro, and especially CoolEdit Pro) have so many configuration parameters that it's well-nigh impossible to try them all out, especially since they perform their processing so slowly.
DCart, Sound Laundry, and Wave Repair are better in this respect because they have a realtime preview mode which allows you to adjust the parameters while listening to their effect.
WAVclean, while not working in real time, allows you to listen to the results so far while it's still processing the remainder of the file.
Wave Corrector (which again doesn't work in real time) has detection and repair algorithms which seem to be rather more effective than many, so I feel it is well worth investigating. A useful feature is that it allows the user to review and adjust the correction of each individual click.
Groove Mechanic is another tool which doesn't work in real time, but whose results are sufficiently good to warrant a recommendation. Fortunately it has few adjustable parameters, so you can't waste huge amounts of time fiddling with them in a futile attempt to find the best settings.
CoolEdit 2000's Audio Cleanup plug-in and Sound Forge's Noise Reduction DirectX plug-in seem to give the best results of them all. Unfortunately CoolEdit's plug-in processing is painfully slow, but the factory defaults appear to be well suited to LP cleanup. (Curiously, the presets in CoolEdit Pro are not nearly so effective, unless they have been updated since I last evaluated it). Initial impressions of Sound Forge's Noise Reduction plug-in were very good (because I happened to try it first on a WAV file that had defeated all other tools), but on further detailed evaluation I've come to the conclusion that on most material the Vinyl Restorer and Click/Crackle Reducer perform about on a par with CoolEdit2000's Audio Cleanup plug-in. Given that Sound Forge itself is currently $350, and the Noise Reduction plug-in is a further $280, this can't be considered good value from a purely vinyl restoration perspective. One way to reduce the overall cost would be to find a cheaper editor that can accept the DirectX plug-in. I see that CoolEdit 2000 now supports DirectX plug-ins, but have not yet had a chance to experiment with this facility. Note that the low-cost version of Sound Forge itself (Sound Forge XP) cannot accept DirectX plug-ins. Setting aside the price for a moment, on the plus side Sound Forge's Noise Reduction plug-in executes very much faster than CoolEdit 2000's Audio Cleanup plug-in. It has a realtime preview feature which should make setting the parameters much easier. However, you do need a fairly fast CPU to run it, and based on the time taken to execute the processing I'd guess that something like a 500MHz CPU is probably required. In summary, if you have a fast enough CPU to use realtime preview, and are able to afford the price, Sound Forge's Noise Reduction plug-in will probably enable you to achieve results as good or perhaps better than CoolEdit 2000's Audio Cleanup plug-in, and with much less effort.
Another product with a good reputation is Steinberg's WaveLab (some professional users regard it as superior to Sound Forge), but I have not evaluated it.
The bottom line though is that there is as yet no automatic way to remove all the clicks and pops without also affecting some aspect of the music. I perform this step manually in most cases, by listening to the waveform, homing in on the clicks, and redrawing the wave shape with the mouse, interpolating out the defect, or pasting over a replacement section of wavform from nearby. When doing this, it is best to monitor on headphones as they are far more revealing of clicks and pops than loudspeakers. In order to manually redraw a waveform, both GoldWave and CoolEdit 2000 have the ability to zoom in to individual samples and move them. However, their interfaces for this operation are clumsy, and Wave Repair is a much better tool for this task.
Many people have asked me for tips about how to find defects in a waveform. The best advice I can give you is that you'll learn through experience. This may sound like buck-passing, but actually getting in there and playing around with WAV files teaches you more than anything you can read. You need to acquire a gut feel for what the various audible defects look like on the waveform, and the best way to do this is with practice. As you gain more and more experience, progress becomes faster and faster.
Having said all that, I can pass on a few tips:
- Obvious narrow spikes that shoot up and down very quickly are usually easy to spot and fix. Bear in mind that the audible effect of a big spike may include some "ringing" for several dozen samples after its visual effect on the waveform seems to have disappeared (in other words, you might find that it's necessary to extend the repair further along the trailing edge than seems visually necessary). Smaller spikes tend to be much more localised, and you can often repair just the obvious visual damage.
- "Dull thuds/plops" and "smeared splats" tend to be much longer, often extending over several dozen or even a few hundred samples. Visually they often look like normal waveforms that just seem bigger than their surroundings. Other times they are caused by a shift up or down of the general waveform over the course of a few dozen samples (a sudden shift up or down within a few samples gives a much sharper click). When repairing these, it's often surprising how much further you need to extend the repair both in front and behind the apparent visual damage. I think this is probably because it's much harder to be certain where the damage really starts and ends just by looking.
- It is intuitive to try and repair as few samples as possible, but as pointed out above, the audible glitch often extends beyond the visual glitch, so don't be afraid to try longer repairs. When you're looking at a waveform at a high degree of zoom, it's easy to forget how short a time period you're dealing with.
- Visual appearance doesn't always correlate with audibility, especially on minor damage. Things that look quite alarming can often be inaudible, while you can spend ages trying to track down an elusive "tick" that turns out to be an almost invisible pimple just one or two samples long on the rising or falling slope of a much larger waveform.
Another type of vinyl artifact you might want to remove is distortion due to damage caused by previous mistracking. Manually redrawing waveforms certainly doesn't get you very far with this. I have found that this kind of distortion can sometimes be removed quite well by two of the packages mentioned above. Sound Laundry's de-scratcher (using only the de-crackle facility, leaving de-click switched off) can give good results, with only subtle artifacts (the worst aspect is that vocal sibilance tend to be emphasised). WAVclean usually removes even more of the mistracking distortion than Sound Laundry, but its artifacts are rather more obvious, and I can only describe them as imparting a "hollow" sort of characteristic. I have also on occasions been able to reduce mistracking damage using parametric EQ with a very deep notch filter at a fairly high frequency (eg. around 15kHz). This dulls the frequency balance, so a compensatory lift somewhere around 4kHz is needed to restore some of the lost "sparkle"; it's not perfect but it can be an improvement. My opinion is that GoldWave has the best parametric EQ at an affordable price.
Recommended Automatic Declickers
- Sound Laundry is very good at reducing constant "crackle", but can introduce artifacts (hollow-sounding "pops", and an emphasis of vocal sibilants).
- Later versions of DCart (DCart32 and later) are pretty good for general vinyl-type "hash", and have surprisingly low artifacts. (My experience with an earlier version of DCart was not so impressive).
- Wave Repair is more aimed at individual distinct clicks which, provided they are detected, are usually repaired with little or no audible artifacts. Since it attempts to repair without artifacts, it does tend to miss clicks that other more aggressive packages pick up. The latest version has a decrackling feature which is fairly effective at reducing hash and crackle, but this particular function unfortunately has no realtime preview option.
- CoolEdit 2000's Audio Cleanup plug-in gives better results than other packages, so I recommend it despite the fact that it operates perhaps an order of magnitude slower than other packages. The only noticable artifact is a roughening of loud "raspy" instruments (eg. sax).
- Sound Forge's very expensive Noise Reduction 2.0 plug-in works about as well as CoolEdit 2000's Audio Cleanup plug-in but operates significantly faster. On fast CPUs it is possible to do realtime preview.
- Groove Mechanic works nearly as well as CoolEdit 2000, and has the advantage that it runs very much faster. It has far fewer adjustments, so you can discover whether it's going to work very quickly.
- Wave Corrector is an effective all-round declicker with minimal artifacts. Unlike the other packages mentioned, it allows you to manually review and adjust the correction applied to individual clicks.
An Interesting Approach to Decrackling
The procedure briefly is this:
- Get a noise fingerprint from the WAV file to be decrackled. In other words, find a section that contains only noise and light crackle, but no music.
- Use the noise fingerprint to do a noise reduction over the whole file, but keeping just the noise (rather than the music minus the noise). You need to do a fairly brutal noise reduction (eg. 100% in CoolEdit). What you end up with is the noise, the light crackle, and a bit of the music.
- Save the noise that's just been isolated, either in a file or a clipboard.
- Run a declick operation over the noise. Be fairly aggressive, so as to find all the crackle. You now have the noise minus the crackle.
- Mix-paste the noise that you saved in step 3 over the result of the declick, but invert the saved noise that you're pasting. This causes the noise to cancel out, leaving just the crackle, but inverted.
- Now mix-paste that inverted crackle back into the original file. Because the crackle is inverted, it cancels the crackle in the original file.
So how does this work? My view is that the reason decrackling is so hard to do is because the clicks that constitute the crackle are of low amplitude, and are easily lost within the surrounding music: this makes identifying them very difficult. Once you've isolated just the background noise & crackle, the click detection algorithms have a much easier task, so they find the genuine clicks more successfully. The quality of the noise reduction really isn't that important, and the declicking algorithms can be less sophisticated since their task is greatly eased.
Younglove described the process using CoolEdit, and it is certainly very straightforward using that package since you can set up a script to do it, but it is a very slow operation. (My old machine, which had a 350MHz AMD K6-2 CPU, took about 6 hours to decrackle one LP using this method. I now have a 1.2GHz Athlon CPU, and an LP can be decrackled in about 50 minutes). In principle the technique will work with any packages that support the necessary steps. Since CoolEdit processes so slowly, you might find that using a combination of other, faster, packages might be quicker in the long run, even if you have to switch between different packages for the various stages. The only program I know of which has a built-in decrackling facility based on this technique is Wave Repair.
Equalisation
Normalisation and Compression
Note that normalisation does not guarantee that all tracks will sound equally loud; the perceived loudness is equally influenced by the dynamic range of the music. Compression can be used to squash the dynamic range which makes the music sound louder. It also tends to sound more "punchy". Applying differing levels of compression can be used to balance the loudness of tracks from a variety of sources, but be aware that excessive compression, while sounding initially impressive, can rob the sound of its subtlety.
Some packages I can recommend which provide equalisation, normalisation and compression include GoldWave, CoolEdit 2000, Wave Repair, and DCart.
One situation in which normalisation and compression are likely to be useful is when you are compiling a CD from a variety of sources and wish to make all the tracks sound equally loud. The approach to take here is to normalise all the files, select one as a reference, and then apply the appropriate amount of compression to the other files so that they sound as loud as the reference. This is easier said than done; finding the appropriate compression settings is largely a matter of trial and error. I have written a shareware program called Volume Balancer which automates this process. I've deliberately made it easy to use; having selected the files to be processed, a single button press does the job. There are some other programs around (eg. Audiograbber) which give the user more control, but require that you adjust a variety of settings.
Burning the CDR
Splitting Tracks into Separate WAV Files
Using a Cue Sheet to Identify Tracks
Stripping Out Headers and Trailers, Padding Blocks
The Issue of CD Block Size
The Actual Burn
The latest hidden menace is FastFind. This is a little applet that comes with recent versions of Microsoft Office that wakes up now and again and scurries around your hard disk building info for later use. Needless to say, FastFind consumes vast amounts of resources while it's awake, and naturally it'll be your luck that it will kick in while you're trying to burn a CDR. Kill it, by removing it from your system's Startup group.
If you've read earlier versions of this page, you'll know that I used to burn CDRs from DOS. I took the view that burning a CDR is a realtime operation, and DOS is the only (vaguely) realtime operating system available for the PC. Lately, however, I have started burning direct from Win9x (using CDRWin) and not had a failure yet.
IDE hard disks are perfectly capable of delivering the data rate required to burn a CDR, even if you burn at 4x speed. Take no notice of those who say you have to have SCSI disks (not that I have anything against SCSI). Likewise with so-called "A/V" disks, which are unnecessary for this kind of work; in any case the distinction between "ordinary" and "A/V" disks seems to have disappeared in the last few years. Some people will claim you need to defragment your hard disk before burning, but modern disks have such low seek times that I don't bother with this any more, and I've not had a coaster yet. You may hear horror stories about "thermal recalibration" interrupting the data flow. This is largely a thing of the past (having been superceded by "embedded servo") so you probably don't need to worry about this. I'm not aware of any current production hard disks that still use thermal recalibration.
I'd like to pass on a tip from Martin Audet. This is only relevant if you use an IDE CD writer. (Since my CD writer is SCSI, I'd never considered this issue). Martin advises that you should keep the source hard disk and the CD writer on separate IDE buses. If you put them on the same bus (eg. hard disk as master, CDR as slave), then the chances of data interruption and hence buffer underruns is higher.
Track-at-once burning can be used, and with the variable gap capabilities of some hardware and software can be made to approach disc-at-once results, but frankly all this fiddling about is just skirting around the basic issue, which is that audio discs are best made in disc-at-once mode, period. So don't buy a writer that doesn't support disc-at-once, ok?
Regarding CDR burning software: for audio CD creation, I very strongly recommend CDRWin (and its DOS version, called DAO). CDRWin does one thing very well: it writes CDRs in disc-at-once mode, and allows you to lay out the tracks and indexes exactly how you want. Unlike other packages, it doesn't make any decisions for you. I like to stay in control. A word of warning is in order, though. Some people have found that they are unable to get CDRWin working on their particular systems. This is usually a SCSI configuration problem, but the real issue is that Goldenhawk's support can sometimes be rather unsympathetic. Because of this, my advice is that you should download the demo version of CDRWin and check that it works in your system before actually buying it. (This is the rule for any shareware: don't pay for anything you've not been able to evaluate and verify works as you require).
Roxio's Easy CD Creator is bundled with many CDR drives, and its basic disc writing engine is very solid, provided it works on your system. (There have been many stories from people who were never able to get Easy CD Creator working, and the general conclusion seems to be that it will either work straight out of the box, or it'll never be right). Although it is somewhat lacking in flexibility, it is fine for creation of straightforward audio CDRs. Two other packages which have good reputations are Nero and Feurio, but I have no experience with them.
More in-depth discussion of a wide variety of CDR writing packages is at come.to/satcp.
