What to do with those old records?

Those of us of a certain age will no doubt remember playing music on vinyl. I remember getting my first "hand-me-down" record player, spending my pocket money on 7" singles, later on hunting down picture discs and other limited edition records, and generally having fun with my music.

Time passes however, and the scratchy old black discs have been replaced by shiny silver coasters. I've not been able to face the thought of ditching my old records and so they've been languishing in storage for the past decade. At least they were until I got the bright idea of trying to transfer them onto my computer.

Now a lot of it I've already re-bought on CD (or in some cases bought MP3s online), but some of it just isn't available in any format other than vinyl. It would be nice to get these lost classics (or old crap as my wife puts it) in an easy to use format. Of course, I've still got a stereo stacker system (remember those?) which I've hooked up to my PC and recorded off an album or two.

There are some disadvantages to this.

One is that the stereo is large, heavy, bulky and pulling it over to where the PC is also means that I'm tripping over the damn thing whenever I'm trying to record from it.

OK, so thats more of an inconvenience than a real problem. So do things get easier once you've plugged the earphone socket of the stereo into the soundcards line-in?

Nope.

The sound levels can be a bit tricky to set up correctly. Once you've set up the graphic equalisers on the front of the stereo to a nice level, found the right volume to avoid clipping when you're recording it back and finally managed to record the album you STILL find an annoying hum (from the stereo's built in amplifier).

Now you can remove the worst of the hum, hiss and crackle from the records using Audacity (or whatever other audio software you use) but sadly the more you need to clean up, the more the sound quality of the final track suffers. (Before any audiophiles get in and start telling me about resisters that need to go between this, that and the other, forget it. I'm trying to record some music, not take lessons in soldering.)

The final results were passable, but still contained a bit of hum, which was certainly noticable when playing them alongside regular MP3s.

So what are the alternatives? Well, these days you can get hold of USB Turntables reasonably cheaply. These plug directly into your computers USB port and allow you to record directly from there. If you shop around you can normally pick up a cheap one from just over £20 (or less if you can get something in the sales). I picked mine up for just over £11 which was a bit of a bargain. They're also small enough to fit on my desk next to my PC when I'm in the mood to transfer some of my music.

If you are using Windows then you can just plug in and go (* see the notes at the end). There is a "drivers" disk supplied with the turntable, which doesn't actually contain any drivers. Instead it installs a copy of Audacity for you. The accompanying instructions take you through recording, cleaning up and exporting your tracks using Audacity.

Using it with Linux was just as easy. I plugged it in, installed Audacity using the package manager and from there on in the provided instructions were fine.

Recording using the turntable is much more straight forward than using the stereo. Firstly there are no levels or volume to adjust, you just plug in, select the USB device to record from and that's about it.

The instructions probably won't be needed for most of us, but it's always nice to see how other people do things. Personally after recording the track I normalise it, use a low level noise reduction to remove the worst of the hiss and clicks, manually split it into separate tracks and then save it to MP3. You can, of course, save to WAV, FLAC, OGG or whatever else floats your musical boat.

For those of you who may be interested, I tested this out with what is probably the oldest album that I've got - Baby Grand's self-titled first album from 1977, which was the first album I owned (I'd won it at a fairground).

The annoying hum from the stereo was totally absent when recording via USB and the overall sound quality on the final tracks was surprisingly good. All in all a good solution to the problem of transferring my old music.


* One last note about Windows and USB turntables. Not all versions of Windows will work with them. Windows XP and XP Pro should be fine, but Windows Media Center ironically enough doesn't contain the necessary drivers and so doesn't work. Apparently Windows Vista doesn't either. Some of the newer ones do have support however, so if you are using one of these versions of Windows, then you'll need to check to see if your OS is properly supported.

Any current version of Linux should work "out of the box" as it were, but if in doubt check with your distro's supplier. Ubuntu 8.10 certainly had no problems. Plugged it in, selected DSP2 as the recording device in Audacity, and that's it. No drivers to install, no problems.

DRM Free Downloads Part 2 - We7

After my post on legal sources of DRM free music in the UK, Steve Purdham, CEO of We7 posted the following:

At We7, All the content we sell is DRM free and will work on linux. Unfortunately thats not the front line content at the moment but that will change in the coming months. The streaming will work on any computer with flash installed.

hope this helps,

Steve Purdham
CEO - We7

This is a music download service with a difference. For starters you can listen to streaming versions of all the songs for free (albeit with a short advert at the start of each track). The fun starts when you sign up (which is free too).

At this point you can choose to either buy the song via ITunes, buy the song as an MP3 direct from them (costing 70p), save to your streaming playlist, or download a free advert supported MP3 (encoded at 192khz).

Listening to your playlist is certainly no worse than listening to music on the radio (remember doing that back in the day?) and the short adverts aren't too obtrusive at the moment, not to mention that this station is playing only the songs that you choose.

As if that wasn't enough, there is a big bonus for all the cheapskates out there.

All downloaded advert supported tracks will also be listed on your "Available Soon" page. After 28 days you get the option to spend some of your We7 credits (of which you get 20 free ones each month) to buy ad-free versions at either a discount, or in some cases entirely free! You can buy extra credits as you want.

The site itself is very clean, it is very easy to find the music, and the playlist features of the site work well.

At the moment the content is a bit hit-and-miss, with some stuff only available via links to ITunes, but in all fairness even though the site is still in beta there is a good selection of stuff avilable for us Linux users.

I've been browsing their site today and I've got to admit I think it's a great way to sample new music, especially the unsigned bands section. Hopefully this will take off in a big way, especially as this should work on any platform that supports flash player.

Why not head on over to www.we7.com and give it a shot?

Update 1: I've had more of a hunt through their site and found some more cool stuff.

They have a pop-up player application to play your streaming playlists (which is a really nice idea), plus they allow you to embed the streaming media in your blog / website

Anarchy In The UK (Original 1977 Recording)

Nice or what?

Where to buy legal DRM-free music in the UK?

During an in-depth discussion with a work colleague last week (basically he was trolling the "Linux users want everything for free" point of view) the discussion moved round to digital music downloads, and how people should support ITunes (he's a Mac user).

My point was that the DRM used for ITunes rules it out for me (the DRM isn't supported on Linux). Even for Apple's DRM free stuff the necessity to run the ITunes player to access the ITunes shop rules Linux out unless you are willing to try and run it through Wine.

The main alternative if you are running Linux is to buy the CD and rip it to MP3 or OGG yourself. Amazon was suggested as an alternative source of legal MP3s.

So I checked. Amazon do sell DRM free MP3s which is great. . . . . . if you live in America. That's right - they don't sell to Europe yet.

So what other options do we have in the UK for this?

HMV also sell regular MP3s, alongside the DRM'd WMA files, but as their site says if you try and access it from FireFox:

Unfortunately at the moment, hmv downloads is not compatible with Firefox, Safari or Opera browsers.
If you can see this message, please access the service using Internet Explorer.

Bugger. Another route blocked.

That leaves us with Play.com. Their service supports MP3s, and works through any browser. They've also got a fairly decent range of music to choose from, and they are cheaper than the competition.

To quote the Play.com site:

Works with all MP3 players, including IPods. DRM free MP3s. No software to install.

Nice one! Track prices range from around 60p to 70p each (this varies from album to album but appears to be cheaper than the competition) and are encoded as 192khz and 320khz MP3s, again this varies from album to album, but most new ones seem to be 320khz.

So for commercial DRM free music downloads on Linux it looks like it is a one horse race at the moment, with Play.com being the only runner.

So do any of you know of any legal DRM free download services that run on native Linux and are available to those of us in the UK?