by Tony Gogay: apgogay@globalnet.co.uk

To transfer your record collection to CD, there are 3 basic steps. Step 1 is to get the music on to your computer hard drive. Step 2 is to edit the sound file and make it ready to be put onto CD. Step 3 is to write the sound files as tracks onto your CD.

Looks easy when it is written down like that, but first have you got the right equipment? Obviously you need a record player with a sound out terminal and a stereo lead to connect it to your computer sound card line in. Some software is needed to record the sound to the hard drive. Some more software is useful, to edit the sound file to remove any annoying little noises that might be there and generally sort the sound file out. Finally a CD-ROM writer is required and software to create your new masterpiece on CD. The CD-ROM writer needs to be CDDA compatible, but most are. Oh! I almost forgot, you also need lots and lots of hard drive space, (Ed: Try buying a new hard disk without it!), so you can build your CD before writing it out. If you have all of this and plenty of time then you can proceed to put your record collection onto CD.

The software that you use to record your audio can make the difference between making the job easy or extremely hard. After some trial and error the software that I use is Easy CD Creator Deluxe. This software, from Adaptec, is extremely good. This is because it is a fully featured package and, in my opinion, the most user friendly I have used. You can get hold of a copy for about £50. I believe version 4 will be available soon.

Let's start at step 1, (always a good place to start). You have got your record player connected to your computer via a stereo lead. Within Easy CD Creator Deluxe there is a program called CD Spin Doctor. The CD Spin Doctor program allows you to make your own audio CDs from a variety of music sources, including LPs and cassette tapes. You can use the recording options included with CD Spin Doctor to clean up the surface noise of old songs, (such as scratchy LPs), and record them to CD.

Recording your music is a case of trial and error. What I did was start recording near the end of the previous track and stop at the beginning of the next, this way I definitely got the track I was after, but also it meant a lot of editing was needed to clean the track up.

Step 2 is editing the resultant wave file. This is very time consuming, as you will want the sound to be as good as possible. This is where you need lots and lots of hard drive space. The CD Spin Doctor software has recording options to clean the audio to reduce clicks, pops and hiss. There are other options to detect silences and separate the audio into multiple tracks. There are yet more options to balance the loudness of selected tracks, so if the different audio samples where recorded from different sources the sound levels between them will be balanced. Once happy with the new wave file that has been created I then move it to a directory where I am creating my CD. Each song on a CD is a separate track. You could write each song separately to the CD, as you are finished with it. I tried this, to save on hard drive space, but all I ended up doing was ruining 2 CD's. Consequently I stick with building the entire CD on my hard drive and then writing it in one go.

This is not a ten-minute job; it will take hours of recording and sorting out the tracks to build up your CD. Sometimes you can be lucky and the recorded audio wave file needs little or no editing, but on average some time is needed to make the audio better in some way. Also, an average track, (just one song), that is about 4 minutes long can take up about 40 MB. One LP that contains 10 tracks, for example, can take about 400 MB. However, once you have your assembled tracks on your hard drive, you can then write your CD in one go.

(Ed: After seeing the first draft of this article I spoke with Tony about the time involved in the above process. If you were not fussy and accepted the sound quality from your LP as it stands then it would be possible with this software to simply record the whole of an LP in one go. As Tony says above the software would take care of separating the tracks and even balance the audio levels. Consequently, with acceptance of a degradation in quality, but not below that of the original LP, the task can be made much quicker.)

Step 3 is writing the wave files as tracks to your CD. This is the easy part, using the Easy CD Creator Deluxe program. Selecting the Audio CD layout option you literally drag and drop the wave files in the order that you want them on your CD. When you have enough to fill a CD you then write it. The software program does all the converting of the wave file to Digital Audio, (CDDA), which is the format of audio discs. After all the hard work in preparing everything it really is that simple.

The above is a very simple explanation of how to convert analogue sounds, i.e. those from LP or tape that have to go through you sound card, to digital format. The software that I have come to rely on is the Adaptec Easy CD Creator Deluxe. It is not cheap but what you get from it is very good. It makes the job of converting the music to digital wave files very easy and the noise reduction is very easy to use as well. Take your time get the sound files right, clean them up and when ready write them out. It does take time and patience to get it right but it is worth it.

Postscript from the Editor:

If £50 for the Adaptec Easy CD Creator Deluxe is too much Tony tells me there are some shareware programs around. One that Tony tried was Cool Edit 96. It was a good piece of software but you could not use all of the options at the same until the software was registered. Cool Edit 96 can record music to your hard drive and can also filter and reduce noise. If you use Cool Edit 96 you will still need to find something else to write the wave files out to the CD Writer.