Pure Vinyl Software

Thanks everybody for the feedback and suggestions.

Ejlif had told me some time ago about how he used the Masterlink and how the recording in the end was better sounding than the CD you could buy in the store. This really intrigued me as I love my vinyl setup and I love the sound of vinyl. I would rather buy vinyl and listen to it than anything else. I don't always have the time to listen to vinyl though so the next best thing is to record it. I can then have it in iTunes to play back through my HiFi or on my iPod to listen to on the road, at work, etc.

It seems that bands are catching on to this notion of vinyl. Wilco's release, "Sky Blue Sky", included a CD when you purchased the vinyl. Low's release, "Drums and Gums", included a coupon to download the MP3 version. Both these approaches are very cool, but not quite there. Ideally, you buy the vinyl and get a coupon to download the lossless files. Bandwidth is cheap and prevalent. I'm sure there are many arguements against this but this is what I'd like to see. But I digress...

I will report back to this thread once I have something up and running with PureVinyl.

Jwynacht,
I took a look at PureVinyl. It is an interesting little program and certainly has some good features that could simplify LP transfer. But the author wants over $200 for it. I am not sure it is worth the price. What troubles me most is not the program but the ADC inside a Mac which is not very good. For two or three hundreds more you could buy a used Masterlink which has a much better ADC built in.

Save up for the Tascam DV-RA1000HD. Excellent device. It allows all kinds of formats (including DVD-A) up to 192KHz/24bit (also DSD format, which is not too useful for me). Burns directly to DVD or redbook CD standard. Allows you to USB the data to a computer so you can edit it with another program to get rid of pops, etc. Has tremendous hard drive space (60 GB) that you can store hundreds of hours on. Has EQing, limiting, compression (if you want to do such a thing...). You can set gain on the input (among other things). Best of all, you can use it to play back all your recordings, instead of buying a separate CD/DVD player!

You can set it to Fade in/out. You can set it to split tracks automatically and to start recording at the first noise above a certain level (or split tracks under the same circumstances). You can merge tracks if any mistakes occur. Too many features to list... I love it.

It is expensive, but IMO, well worth it.

Yeah sure it's a little bit of a pain, but playing an album isn't to hard right? You can listen to it and record it at the same time. With the Alesis Masterlink it takes 10 minutes tops to edit the audio into tracks and then you just push a button and put in the CD to record it to and it's done in about 10 minutes. Not to bad. I think it's kind of fun.

It seems like there is a misunderstanding on here regarding putting this stuff in your ipod. If you rip the music at Apple Lossless it sounds just as good as the CD (no loss in quality) You can put it in your ipod. As a matter of fact the newest ipods sound better than any of my car stereos at this point playing back that same CD. So yeah you are getting better sound from a recorded LP then you get if you buy the CD and MP3 just plain old sound like crap and aren't even worth messing with. Just because music is in an ipod doesn't mean it's at MP3 quality!

I have loaded some of my vinyl recordings into my friends ipods and they have always mentioned how much better they sound even played back on inferior car stereos.

I am using an outboard Wadia AD converter instead of letting the Masterlink do the conversion. I just feed the tape out on my preamp to the analog input on the Wadia, then run a SPDIF digital connection to the Masterlink.

Ejlif,
How do you get Masterlink to burn a CD in 10 minutes? Mine takes about 30 minutes to render and another 40 minutes or so to burn. Did I miss a setting somewhere?