Yes, the NuWave is discontinued.
I’ve done about 1200 albums. Many from the 1950’s and 1960’s, almost all Jazz music. I’m the owner and main writer for https://ctproduced.com - an am working with a couple of people on some bigger projects that I use the blog for.
I’ve mostly only used Audacity. It is pretty manual to start, has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get it working and figure out the correct loudness and equalization for your setup, it works great. I’ve got a few things on YouTube and mixes on Mixcloud. I use different platforms to work within the copyright and licensing laws.
Once you have Audacity setup, you can automate most of the steps. The GREAT thing about Audacity, is you can do very fine, manual cleanup. For example, I’ve just worked on a couple of 33 1/3 7-inch LP’s by Chris Conner. They were in terrible condition. They were mono, recorded in Audacity in stereo. To edit out noise you can pick either channel and blank out the other channel. Then when you export from Audacity, when can force the export to Mono and you get the best bits of both channels and the worst bits of neither.
There is no way an automated tool can do this. Also, on vinyl that has a lot of surface noise, I found that automated tools would clip the endings of tracks, or on poor quality albums, track recognition was just a mess. Audacity gives you endless ways to do this.
This mix was recorded from all vinyl, via the NPC. It was recorded at 24b/48khz in Audacity, exported as FLAC for archiving and exported to MP3 for listening and streaming. The mixed tracks were from mp3. Hank Crawford - A Born Day Celebration by ctproduced | Mixcloud
This mix is a complete album, it’s on YouTube for copyright reasons. The album was almost completely unknown until recently. It was a self-released record. When it arrived it had a 1/2 crack, it took me a while but got a completely serviceable/usable recording from it, mix the tracks, added sound to a few pictures and exported to .mp4 for upload to YouTube. The sound was .mp3 and is pretty much untouched by by the video/mp4 process. Pete Brady - Sing Me A Smile - YouTube
I use mp3tag to add metadata to the exported files. I’m slowly adding every record/cd/mp3 I own to discogs, and then use discogs as the source of the metadata to tag the files. Here is the Pete Brady album thats on YouTube, same artwork, I had to type everything on discogs, there are millions of release on discogs which means you don’t have to type anything, just retrieve the release number and point mp3tag at it. Pete Brady* - Sing Me A Smile (1973, Vinyl) | Discogs