HOW TO RECORD VINYL LP’s TO YOUR HARD DRIVE IN DIGITAL FORMAT (WAV)

 

Transferring LPs to Hard Drive and finally CD-R: Intro

 

These notes below are my own experiences with my attempts to transfer vinyl LP’s to the hard drive, editing the WAV file, and burning it on a CD-R. I’m not an audio professional, so I’m going to be explaining things that have worked for me during trial and error throughout the last year using different software and hardware combinations that have worked for me.

 

Preliminaries

 

I began this desire to preserve some of my aging vinyl LP collection about a year ago because some are unavailable on CD or aren’t essential enough to me to be worth spending lots of money replacing them on CD. Again, these are my experiences with what has worked for me and I don’t guarantee they will work with your hardware setup. I can sum up the basic steps to transferring a vinyl LP to the CD-R:

1.      Recording the vinyl LP to the hard drive in a WAV format.

2.      Clean the WAV file removing pops and clicks using a WAV editor.

3.      Normalize the WAV files.

4.      Burn the WAV files to a CD-R.

 

Things you will need:

1.      A stereo amplifier with phono inputs and tape output jacks. I use an inexpensive amplifier that I purchased from Radio Shack (cat no. 31-1957) at a cost of ~$60. This saves the time needed to disconnect your current receiver, which can be a hassle if you have lots of ele