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Methods for transfer of albums to CD

A friend of mine has a very large collection of mint albums, including a beatles import box set, and a franklin mint jazz anthology which includes some fantastic music. I own a computer with a HP cd burner, Roxio Easy CD creator 5 software, but no decent sound card. I was wondering if any of you have had any success at creating good sounding CD's from vinyl, and what equipment I might need. I am sure I need a sound card for the computer with an analog and/or digital input, and one of the add on phono pre-amps, which I would likely use later to add analog to my system. Any suggestions and or experiences, both good and bad, will be appreciated. My current system:

Cary 808 amp, SLP 2002 pre-amp, Theta pro gen and Data, B&W 802 Matrix II, and a Windows 95 based PC with CD burner.

Mike
mike7142
abstract7
541 posts
 
I'm certainly not going to propose that you infringe on any copyrighted material. But to archive albums (I have done a few old jazz albums that are not available on CD that I wanted to listen to in the car) there is a fairly easy way. With the HP burner, you should have gotten sonic foundry's ACID program. It will allow you to record from the analog inputs of your computer. In this case you do need a good (or at least decent) soundcard. Use the line level in on your computer and be sure to turn off all other inputs (they create noise). Unless you really have a state of the art soundcard--this will not be audiophile quality, but it will be good. I found mine for the car were more than acceptable, but I don't think they'd measure up to the source material on the home system.
lazarus28
339 posts
 
i use an audiophile 24/96 soundcard made by midiman, which has gold plated rca inputs. i use "lp recorder", a great little program, to record the lp's, and "lp ripper" to break them into tracks and edit intro's and outro's. i then use mp3 to cd, which will take the .wav's created by lp ripper and burn them to cd. you'll have to register all of the programs, but ince you learn how to use them, they are utterly fantastic. the cds created are so close to the actual cd pressings, that cddb usually recognizes the album when i put it in my drive. and the quality is outstanding. in some cases as good as the official cd pressings. all of the programs i mentioned are shareware, but you'll need to register them after a few uses. they're well worth the price. i've archived many an lp. . .
gboren
143 posts
 
Check out the Card Deluxe by Digital Audio Labs. It's great and can be gotten for under $400.
abstract7
541 posts
 
Lazarus, could you post the website for downloading the shareware. Both programs sound very useful, and much easier than the Sonic Foundry that I mentioned, particularly since separating into tracks is not very easy on Sonic Foundry.
mike7142 OP
23 posts
 
Yes, and Lazarus, could you also let me know where you got the midiman sound card and what the approximate cost was. And thanks to all for your input thus far.
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