{"id":1054,"date":"2012-03-08T11:03:51","date_gmt":"2012-03-08T17:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leroyskibone.com\/?p=1054"},"modified":"2012-03-08T12:12:47","modified_gmt":"2012-03-08T18:12:47","slug":"the-great-vinyl-conversion-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.leroyskibone.com\/?p=1054","title":{"rendered":"The great vinyl conversion update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I think I have a pretty decent collection of 80s house\/dance\/techno\/rap on vinyl.<br \/>\nOf course, there will always be someone who has more &#8211; lots more &#8211; like this person:<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2093\/2182138270_e90c0989cf.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><br \/>\nbut thats ok &#8211; it&#8217;s not a competition.<\/p>\n<p>Now comes the hard part &#8211; the move to digital.  Taking all this vinyl and converting it to WAVs (and Youtube videos and Ableton tracks)<br \/>\nAs I think I mentioned before, when I first started the process and posting Youtube videos, I would:<br \/>\nRecord a track, take pictures of the label\/cover, edit\/normalize the track, make the video, post it.<br \/>\nThis got tedious quickly and I went with the production line &#8211; all at once approach:<br \/>\nRecord all the tracks, take all the pictures, edit all the tracks, etc.<br \/>\nSo thats what I did back in 2010 with 4 crates of some of my best vinyl.<br \/>\nAnd now it&#8217;s time to go through the remaining 7 crates (plus the two missing mystery crates &#8211; they are either buried in my sisters basement or my parents tossed them out when I kept them at their house for a while.  I don&#8217;t see how I could have lost them myself the last time I moved.)<br \/>\nAnd here are the steps:<br \/>\n1 &#8211; take pictures of all records &#8211; done<br \/>\n2 &#8211; record all records &#8211; in progress<br \/>\n3 &#8211; edit \/ normalize all records<br \/>\n4 &#8211; edit all pictures<br \/>\n5 &#8211; make videos<br \/>\n6 &#8211; Warp all songs in Ableton<\/p>\n<p>(Here&#8217;s where the OCD starts coming in handy.)<br \/>\nSo I already catalogued every track on every record I have back in 2010.<br \/>\nI have about 1600 tracks left to record.  I&#8217;ll take an educated guess and say that the average song length is 6 minutes.<br \/>\nThats 9600 minutes to record &#8211; 160 hours.<br \/>\nWow &#8211; thats a lot.  At 3 hours a day, thats still 2 months.  I&#8217;m too impatient for that.  How can we speed this up?<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve got my turntable\/mixing box going into my ancient but trusty Roland UA-3 for recording.<br \/>\nBut (obviously) I have two turntables and I have two laptops &#8211; there must be some way to use both.<\/p>\n<p>Hey wait &#8211; I&#8217;ve still got the M-Audio Fast Track Pro collecting dust in the basement (damn drivers don&#8217;t work worth a crap on a laptop with an AMD processor).<br \/>\nIt didn&#8217;t work for the two outputs that I bought it for, but certainly it can do one input, right?  Nope &#8211; I only messed with it for a few minutes but I couldn&#8217;t get it to work.  Back to the basement it goes.<br \/>\nSo I ordered a Behringer UFO-202 USB interface.  It got decent reviews and looks like it should do the same job as my Roland but without the digital optical input and output (which I never used).<br \/>\nOk, that will be here Friday (yay &#8211; free shipping with my Discover card) and cut my remaining recording time in half &#8211; but I should keep working until that gets here.<\/p>\n<p>Now, if you keep making the same mistakes over and over again &#8211; well, you&#8217;re dumb.  But if years pass in between those repeated mistakes, cut yourself some slack.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m recording my vinyl on a very old laptop.  It maxes out at 512megs of memory.  Web surfing is painfully slow and it can&#8217;t even play most Flash games \/ videos.<br \/>\nBut it&#8217;s more than fast enough to record audio and thats all I use it for.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m using Cool Edit Pro &#8211; which is about as old as the laptop, but when something works, I stick with it.<br \/>\nI recorded vinyl for 5 hours straight last night.  There was a possibility that Cool Edit, being an old program, would get confused after 4 hours once the WAV size went over 4 gigs.  It seemed to handle that fine, but something else happened I can&#8217;t explain.  Once I stopped the recording and it showed it onscreen &#8211; the left channel had stopped recording after less than an hour.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s not a huge hard drive but I had enough free space for 5 hours of audio.  But I didn&#8217;t have twice as much free space.  I seem to recall a problem I encountered years ago where I needed twice the space for what I was recording.  It would first record to a temp file, then copy that to the actual file.  But that was long ago and it may have even been different software.<br \/>\nAnd that still wouldn&#8217;t explain it only lost the left channel.  Maybe it was just tired and needed a reboot.  <\/p>\n<p>Anyway, almost all of last night&#8217;s recording are gone.  Maybe I&#8217;ll take Thursday off and just wait for the second USB interface, or just record them all again tonight.<br \/>\nThere were certainly some good tracks I haven&#8217;t listened to in years &#8211; Colonel Abrams, Ministry, classic Tommy Boy tracks.<br \/>\nFor now &#8211; recordings complete is at 8 percent.  I hope to greatly increase that number by the end of the weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I think I have a pretty decent collection of 80s house\/dance\/techno\/rap on vinyl. Of course, there will always be someone who has more &#8211; lots more &#8211; like this person: but thats ok &#8211; it&#8217;s not a competition. Now comes the hard part &#8211; the move to digital. Taking all this vinyl and converting it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leroyskibone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leroyskibone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leroyskibone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leroyskibone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leroyskibone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1054"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.leroyskibone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1058,"href":"https:\/\/www.leroyskibone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054\/revisions\/1058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leroyskibone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leroyskibone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leroyskibone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}