wessman
June 4th, 2003, 07:11 PM
Ripping from Vinyl, Simplified
from the one-groove-per-side dept.
posted by timothy on Tuesday June 03, @06:28 (music)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/03/0329200
An anonymous reader writes "In a short article at [0]linmagau.org John Murray [1]brings Gramofile to our attention, just the thing to help you bring all those LPs in the cupboard into your MP3 collection. One more example of the analog hole in action, I guess ;)" It may not be [2]CEDAR, but it sounds like a lot of utility for a 76kB program.
Links:
0. http://www.linmagau.org/
1. http://www.linmagau.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=153&page=1
2. http://www.engineeringharmonics.com/papers/nrs.htm
4.1 - Gramofile- A Vinyl Record Ripping Tool
Introduction
Mention ripping tools to most people and they'll assume you're talking about apps that copy tracks from audio CDs. But for crusty old farts like myself, it can have a slightly different meaning - ripping from vinyl. Like many others of my era, I've got a collection of vinyl LPs that pre-date the compact disk - though it's interesting to note that even now some indie bands (notably the White Stripes with their recent Elephant album) are still releasing stuff on vinyl.
The trouble with vinyl, of course, is that while the sound quality can be excellent, wear and tear reduces that quality with each successive playing. As well, vinyl is susceptible to damage from poor handling or storage - though I wouldn't be surprised if carefully stored LPs outlasted CDR media... Yet another problem is portability; playing an LP in a walkman or car player isn't all that easy...
Back in the old days, everyone would tape-record their LPs onto cassettes to overcome these problems, and somehow the recording industry survived the rampant piracy. Now, of course, they claim that the jillions of spotty-faced kids swapping Avril Lavigne mp3s have brought them to the brink of bankruptcy....
Since burning CDRs is now such a trivial job, there's really no reason why you can't enjoy those old records, many of which may no longer be available in any format. And this is where Gramofile comes in: it's designed to make the job of transferring music from vinyl to CD easier. Tools that can take the audio output from a turntable and record it as a .wav file are common, and are often installed by default with many distros. You may have something like the sox package, for example, already installed. Gramofile differs from these general purpose programs by including a tool that allows you to split a file into individual tracks, as well as filters to reduce the ticking and crackling. It's available as either source or binaries, and is quite a small download (about 76kB for an RPM package). The interface is curses based (think Midnight Commander), and runs from an Xterm or console. The advantages of this are low memory requirements and a lack of dependency hassles (it doesn't even need X); the downside is a plain (if not ugly) interface. Navigation is easy, and simply entails using the tab and arrow keys to move around the various options. It includes a couple of tools named brecord and bplay for recording to and playing .wav files, as well as the track splitting and filtering functions mentioned above.
Usage
Upon startup, Gramofile displays a splash screen briefly, then a menu giving the options of:
1) Record Audio to a Sound File
2) Locate Tracks
3) Process The Audio Signal
4) Play a Sound File
The recording option is pretty straight forward; just plug a pre-amped turntable into your soundcards' line-in jack and away you go. My initial recording was a bit on the quiet side, so I had to bump up the line-in level using aumix.
The Locate Tracks option is meant to allow an entire side to be recorded to a single file and then have the start/end points for each track detected automatically. Gramofile does this by looking for intervals when the volume falls below a set level for a certain period of time. This works quite well for most records, but it can become confused by others - tracks with quiet intervals and live recordings in particular. It's important to note that the sound file isn't actually split at this stage, Gramofile just writes a simple text file containing what it thinks is the number of tracks and their start/end times. If you disagree with its findings, it's a simple matter to fast-forward through the file with XMMS or whatever, noting the start/end times and editing the tracks file accordingly. You can also adjust the criteria gramofile uses to determine the track info; I played with this for a while but in the end I decided it was easier to just find the times manually with XMMS and edit the tracks file. Of course, you could also record each track individually, but this is a bit of a pain. For most of the LPs I recorded, Gramofile detected the tracks by itself; there were only a few tricky ones that required intervention.
Once you are happy with the track times, you can go to the next step, processing the audio signal. Here the file will be run through a filter, or series of filters, and if you select the Split Tracks box, it will be split into individual files for each track. I experimented with a few of the available filters, and eventually went back to the default (the Conditional Median Filter II), which seemed to do a reasonable job of clearing up the smaller pops and crackles. If you are serious about sound quality, or have scratchy records, you might want to spend some time playing with these filters in order to get the best possible result. The various filters can be used in whatever order you want, or even repeatedly, in a single pass.
I should also mention that the original source file remains unchanged during the splitting/processing steps, so if you somehow stuff things up you can simply delete the processed files and try again, without having to re-record.
The final option, Play Sound File, allows you to start or finish playing from any point in the file, though I never use this one as I find tools like XMMS simpler to use.
Summary
The included documentation is brief but quite good, though it's probably rarely needed for such a simple program. There's also a variety of patches or add-ons available from the website to add functions such as normalizing.
So, is it any good? Well, that depends on what you want from it. Serious audiophiles will probably want to use something more sophisticated, like Audacity for example. But for more casual users like myself, who just want a quick and easy way of ripping from vinyl, Gramofile does the job nicely.
from the one-groove-per-side dept.
posted by timothy on Tuesday June 03, @06:28 (music)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/03/0329200
An anonymous reader writes "In a short article at [0]linmagau.org John Murray [1]brings Gramofile to our attention, just the thing to help you bring all those LPs in the cupboard into your MP3 collection. One more example of the analog hole in action, I guess ;)" It may not be [2]CEDAR, but it sounds like a lot of utility for a 76kB program.
Links:
0. http://www.linmagau.org/
1. http://www.linmagau.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=153&page=1
2. http://www.engineeringharmonics.com/papers/nrs.htm
4.1 - Gramofile- A Vinyl Record Ripping Tool
Introduction
Mention ripping tools to most people and they'll assume you're talking about apps that copy tracks from audio CDs. But for crusty old farts like myself, it can have a slightly different meaning - ripping from vinyl. Like many others of my era, I've got a collection of vinyl LPs that pre-date the compact disk - though it's interesting to note that even now some indie bands (notably the White Stripes with their recent Elephant album) are still releasing stuff on vinyl.
The trouble with vinyl, of course, is that while the sound quality can be excellent, wear and tear reduces that quality with each successive playing. As well, vinyl is susceptible to damage from poor handling or storage - though I wouldn't be surprised if carefully stored LPs outlasted CDR media... Yet another problem is portability; playing an LP in a walkman or car player isn't all that easy...
Back in the old days, everyone would tape-record their LPs onto cassettes to overcome these problems, and somehow the recording industry survived the rampant piracy. Now, of course, they claim that the jillions of spotty-faced kids swapping Avril Lavigne mp3s have brought them to the brink of bankruptcy....
Since burning CDRs is now such a trivial job, there's really no reason why you can't enjoy those old records, many of which may no longer be available in any format. And this is where Gramofile comes in: it's designed to make the job of transferring music from vinyl to CD easier. Tools that can take the audio output from a turntable and record it as a .wav file are common, and are often installed by default with many distros. You may have something like the sox package, for example, already installed. Gramofile differs from these general purpose programs by including a tool that allows you to split a file into individual tracks, as well as filters to reduce the ticking and crackling. It's available as either source or binaries, and is quite a small download (about 76kB for an RPM package). The interface is curses based (think Midnight Commander), and runs from an Xterm or console. The advantages of this are low memory requirements and a lack of dependency hassles (it doesn't even need X); the downside is a plain (if not ugly) interface. Navigation is easy, and simply entails using the tab and arrow keys to move around the various options. It includes a couple of tools named brecord and bplay for recording to and playing .wav files, as well as the track splitting and filtering functions mentioned above.
Usage
Upon startup, Gramofile displays a splash screen briefly, then a menu giving the options of:
1) Record Audio to a Sound File
2) Locate Tracks
3) Process The Audio Signal
4) Play a Sound File
The recording option is pretty straight forward; just plug a pre-amped turntable into your soundcards' line-in jack and away you go. My initial recording was a bit on the quiet side, so I had to bump up the line-in level using aumix.
The Locate Tracks option is meant to allow an entire side to be recorded to a single file and then have the start/end points for each track detected automatically. Gramofile does this by looking for intervals when the volume falls below a set level for a certain period of time. This works quite well for most records, but it can become confused by others - tracks with quiet intervals and live recordings in particular. It's important to note that the sound file isn't actually split at this stage, Gramofile just writes a simple text file containing what it thinks is the number of tracks and their start/end times. If you disagree with its findings, it's a simple matter to fast-forward through the file with XMMS or whatever, noting the start/end times and editing the tracks file accordingly. You can also adjust the criteria gramofile uses to determine the track info; I played with this for a while but in the end I decided it was easier to just find the times manually with XMMS and edit the tracks file. Of course, you could also record each track individually, but this is a bit of a pain. For most of the LPs I recorded, Gramofile detected the tracks by itself; there were only a few tricky ones that required intervention.
Once you are happy with the track times, you can go to the next step, processing the audio signal. Here the file will be run through a filter, or series of filters, and if you select the Split Tracks box, it will be split into individual files for each track. I experimented with a few of the available filters, and eventually went back to the default (the Conditional Median Filter II), which seemed to do a reasonable job of clearing up the smaller pops and crackles. If you are serious about sound quality, or have scratchy records, you might want to spend some time playing with these filters in order to get the best possible result. The various filters can be used in whatever order you want, or even repeatedly, in a single pass.
I should also mention that the original source file remains unchanged during the splitting/processing steps, so if you somehow stuff things up you can simply delete the processed files and try again, without having to re-record.
The final option, Play Sound File, allows you to start or finish playing from any point in the file, though I never use this one as I find tools like XMMS simpler to use.
Summary
The included documentation is brief but quite good, though it's probably rarely needed for such a simple program. There's also a variety of patches or add-ons available from the website to add functions such as normalizing.
So, is it any good? Well, that depends on what you want from it. Serious audiophiles will probably want to use something more sophisticated, like Audacity for example. But for more casual users like myself, who just want a quick and easy way of ripping from vinyl, Gramofile does the job nicely.