Best Practices For Transferring Vinyl Records to Digital Files
If you, like me, have a sizable vinyl record collection, then at some point you may want to make digital copies of them ("vinyl rips") so you can play them out or enjoy them on your phone or computer. I've done this a fair amount of times -- probably about a hundred records -- and let me tell you: there is a lot that can go wrong and affect the quality of your transfers!
A friend of mine recently asked for some tips on vinyl ripping his own collection, so the following started as a comment on his Facebook post. However, after posting, I realized that some of this knowledge may not be very widely known, so I thought I would polish it up and make a blog post of it!
This is not a step-by-step guide for beginners; I am assuming you already have your turntable, software, and audio setup worked out. (I am also kind of assuming you are an electronic music DJ, but this advice should work for anyone.) So if you want your hand held, look elsewhere! This post is more about the little things you want to think about before you hit Record:
- Check your pitch calibration using the dots on the side of the platter and the red light. You want to make sure that the '0' on the pitch control corresponds with exactly 33 or 45 RPM. This is especially important for accurate BPM readings, beatgridding, and beatmatching. If you don't know how to do this, here is a good guide.
- It helps to have two turntables: one for recording (deck 1), and one for prepping the next disc you want to record (deck 2).
- Do a quick cleaning on the disc right before you record to reduce dust. A wet cleaning would be best; I usually do this on deck 2 while deck 1 records. You can put a fan on it so it dries fast. This way all you will have to do on the disc you are recording is a quick dusting or dry clean, mainly to catch dust from the slipmat (if you use those) or the rubber mat.
- Use a fresh needle; worn needles will impact sound quality!
- Use a good preamp. it will make a huge difference! The preamps on my Pioneer XDJ controller are complete ass. Preamps are usually kind of expensive, but I've had good luck with some of the cheap Chinese units you can get off Amazon. (Fosi Audio makes a pretty good hybrid tube/solid state preamp that isn't too expensive.)
- If you're using a digital recorder, it can be annoying to match up generically-named audio files to their original disc. So, on a notepad, or in your phone's notes, write down the file name on the recorder next to the record name or Discogs ID. Then, it will be easy to match which file goes to each disc, and then you can add other metadata later. (And be sure to hit the 'track cut' button, or hit stop and then record again!)
- For electronic music: even with the Technics direct drive, even if you calibrate it with the red light and the dots, there is very slight pitch wobble and BPM won't usually be a perfect round number. I believe this is a symptom of analog being analog both on your turntable and on the record cutter that produced the original mother that your disc is stamped from. This makes accurate BPM readings and setting up beatgrids on DJ software a much bigger pain in the ass than you might be used to with digital files. Be careful playing these out with SYNC enabled!
- If possible, you should record in 32-bit float format. This way it is practically impossible to clip the recording! Then you can set audio levels in post and bounce the final cut to 16-bit. 32-bit float has such a wide dynamic range that clipping is never going to happen. (That said, I don't think this benefits sound quality very much if at all; but there are those who would argue that you should record in at least 24-bit. My suspicion is that this is an audiophile's old wives' tale. My own research indicates that vinyl's dynamic range is equivalent to something closer to 12-bit digital audio.)
- Recording in anything above 44.1khz is probably overkill -- but if you want a higher sample rate do an integer multiple like 88.2khz. This way, you can minimize the chances of downsampling adding weird quantization artifacts. Again, there are those who would argue you should record in the highest sample rate you can, but in my opinion this more audiophile cargo-culting. (The exception here is if you plan on doing weird stuff to the resulting audio file, like pitching it down, sampling, or running it through an FX chain. In those cases a higher sample rate would be better.)
- Set your needle weight to something a little higher than usual, so that you can minimize skips.
- Make sure the needle is as close to perpendicular to the disc as possible; a slanted needle will produce stereo audio levels that are slightly higher in one channel than the other. If possible you will want to verify this with level meters before getting started.
And one bonus tip: handle your needles and the tonearm very carefully! Don't be like me and drunkenly clip the cartridge with your arm, sending the needle skidding across the record like a crashed motorcycle. The tonearm+cartridge+needle assembly is very delicately balanced and shocks like that can throw something out-of-whack!
Finally, I don't have any recommendations for needles or cartridges, other than the venerable Shure M44g, if you can get your hands on one. I'm still pissed that Shure stopped making them. When I run out of spares I will be a very sad panda. (Though I have heard good things about JICO's clones.)
Fix Broken Beatport MP3 Downloads in Serato
If you're experiencing a problem with Serato DJ, where MP3s purchased on Beatport cannot seem to save key, BPM, or track analyses and overviews, then perhaps a tool that I have written might help!
Check out MP3TagRebuilder, a simple Python script I wrote to address this issue with my own DJ library!
This tool addresses an issue I've been encountering somewhat frequently over the last few years, where my Beatport music purchases have a weird glitch in Serato where overviews and tag data won't save, even after using the "Analyze" feature. The only solution I have found, even after writing Serato support, is to rebuild the MP3 files' ID3 tags destructively.
However, every program that I know of that does this ends up dropping important tags, such as Album Art, because none of them provide a direct pathway to simply destroying the ID3 tags and then rebuilding them with a new datastructure; most of them only seem to support converting from ID3v2 to ID3v1 and back again. So I wrote my own!
If you are encountering this issue and are feeling bold enough to test my code on your own library (MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP AND TEST IT!!!!), head on over to Github and check it out!
You will need a working Python environment and must be comfortable with a command prompt. Instructions for running this tool are included in README.md, and instructions for installing Python can be found here.
Get it from Github here: https://github.com/lyjia/mp3-tag-rebuilder
New Mix Series: P.O.P. Music!
.png)
(TL;DR: Listen to my new mix here!)
For the past several years I have had a DJ act centered around trippy house music, and in 2022 I decided to take this and coalesce it around a single act (or brand) I have taken to calling "P.O.P. music". Essentially, it is a unique blend of modern progressive house, organic house, and psy house. ("Psy house" or "Progressive Psy" being another term I've coined, since I don't know what people are currently calling this stuff. If it truly hasn't been labelled yet I should probably make a post explaining more...)
Fast forward to today, and out of all the various genres that I like to spin, this one seems to be resonating the most with people. It seems to be a fairly unique act; I know DJs that spin progressive house, I know DJs that like to drop nice world-flavored organic house cuts, and I even know a few folks out in the desert dropping psytrance-influenced progressive house sets to great success. But I don't know anyone (yet) blending these things into a cohesive whole. And that is the goal of P.O.P. Music: combining the three to create an enticing, stimulating, and energetic (but not too energetic!) mix that is just as much at home on the dance floor as it is in a chill lounge, on a long road trip, as a study buddy, or as companion for exploring altered states of consciousness.
I'll be honest: I get bored of straight progressive house. I used to have a deep house-prog house "act", and it was fun and people liked it, but it was a bit of a snooze to mix. Psytrance-influenced house music helped spice it up a bit, but it was still a little boring for me. Around this time I was attending burner parties in the deserts and steppes of Southern California, and a new kind of house music was emerging that I fell absolutely in love with: organic house, where the rigid synthesis of progressive house and techno gave way to sampled, real-life performances with foreign-language vocalists and instruments like cellos, oboes, tampuras, and the like. With this new genre you could travel from the Himalayas to the deserts of the middle east, from the Amazon to the Urals, from Death Valley to the steppes of Africa, all in an hour's time. As a collector of foreign music, this was love at first sight! And it seemed to be the missing piece that reinvigorated my interest in and love for house music.
Throughout 2022 I crystalized this act into something cohesive and consistent, and played it out in a variety of settings around San Diego. And every single time, people were blown away. After my sets people would come up to me and use words like "amazing" and "beautiful", or would tell me about how they had sex to it, or how a particular crescendo had moved them to tears.
P.O.P. Music will never be as exciting as something like dubstep or tech house, but it is not designed to be. It is music for the mind: it is for the psychonauts, the nerds and intellectuals, and the travelers among us. It is for those who find beauty as invigorating as a sick bass, and for those who desire to hear the sounds of the human voice but care not for the words that come out. It is for explorers, for the aesthetically starved, and those tired of dancefloors dominated by the excessive energy of balls-to-the-wall EDM. It is P.O.P. Music!
You can stream and download P.O.P. Music! Vol. 1 on SoundCloud, and it is also available for streaming on Mixcloud.
sui generis.
Lyjia's Blog
All writing here is my own, does not represent the views of my employers, and is made without AI assistance.