(Crossposted from my other "blog" which has a nice photo of the setup, but lacks everything else (comments, RSS, ..)...)
For a lot of reasons I prefer vinyl to CDs as my primary medium for
music. But I still want to carry my music around, and not only is vinyl
rather heavy, the real killer is the lack of portable turntables
that work while cycling...
A few days ago I packed one of my turntable and my old and crappy mixer
into my bike trailer and hauled them and a selection of records to my
office. Now I can listen to proper music while working, and convert it
to mp3 at the same time.
As the setup is kind of interesting, here's a quick rundown through the
hard- and software used:
The turntable connects to the mixer, which does the preamp needed to
convert the weak signal from the turntable into something line-in can
take. The mixer than connects to my USB sound device (rather ancient, I
got it when we lived in Berlin in 2000). The USB thingy is plugged into
my desktop machine (of course running Debian), where
I use Audacity to
record the audio signal.
After I recored a whole record, I have to do some manual fiddling to
remove the gaps in the recording left when I had to switch records. I
than add a 'label track' and add track marks at appropriate places
(silence auto detecting just does not work good enough). Then I hit
'Export multiple' and let audacity convert the wavs to mp3.
Now I have a bunch of ugly-named mp3-files lacking proper meta data. I
wrote several small scripts and tools to first rename the files to
something like '01.mp3'. I fetch the CDDB data from freedb.org (or if I
cannot find it there, I can write up a small file containing the
meta data from hand or copy it from wikipedia). Another script then
parses the meta data, finds the matching mp3 file, adds ID3 tags, moves
it to my music archive and generates a proper filename (which of course
is '02_guns_dont_kill_people_rappers_do.mp3').
And that's it!
Re:Cheers
domm on 2009-08-24T06:11:09
if by 'them' you mean MP3s, you'll want to check out Mixxx
I did not know about freedb.org. I've been converting vinyl and putting 01SongTitle1, 02SongTitle2 in the label track marks, and exporting to files based on those names. I did find that I couldn't type "z" in the label text though (??). So no songs with a "z" in them for me
I just did a search on freedb for the last record I converted, and didn't find it. I didn't even find the artist at first, 'cuz I was looking for "Pearl Harbour and the Explosions", and I accidentally typed "Perl"...go figure
Actually a lot of what I'm converting I'm not finding on freedb...maybe I should whip up some perl to submit data...
Re:Did not know
domm on 2009-09-08T20:30:47
The "Search" on freedb.org is really bad, IMO. I usually have to click through some pages until I find the metadata I'm looking for.
And I'm not sure if submitting data generated from vinyl will work, because the whole point of freedb and all this CD-autometadata-thingy is that they take a checksum of the CD and use it to look up the correct track listings (/me thinks...)
