Analog to digital converter software

Hi all. Hopefully someone has some experience with this. About 7 or 8 years ago, my wife got me a Parasound Zphono USB phono pre-amp, digital interface. It’s basically an analog to digital converter with a phono stage. I’m finally thinking about using the thing to rip some LPs. The manual recommends one of three software packages to manage the output and I’m wondering if anyone has any experience with them and could make a recommendation. One is “spin it again” from Acoustica. The second is “vinyl studio” by Alpinesoft. The third is “audacity”, which is a free shareware.

Thanks so much in advance,

David

I’ve used the free version of Audacity for a couple of years now without any issues.
Ripped LPs and also edited ripped files from CDs, live recordings to lesson the audience noise at the end of tracks.

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An advantage to Audacity is there are many people using it and it should be easy to get help if you run into issues.

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I guess trying freeware first would be smart. If anyone would have told me when I started into this hobby I’d be hooking a PC up to my system I’ve have thought them mad. Of course, I just tuned up my motorcycle for the season and I needed a PC to complete that. Who would have guessed?

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I used Audacity for 2 or three years. I stopped using it because it didn’t support 24 bit depths at that time.
About 6 years ago I started using Vinyl Studio. I have probably ripped about 3000 records with this software in that time and find it to function well.
Alpinesoft has been quite responsive when issues arose with Windows updates.

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I also use Vinyl Studio (Mac version) and like it. It was recommended by PSA for use with their NuWave Phono Converter but it will work with digital files from other sources as well. It has some nice features, like being able to look up metadata, which helps with placing track breaks and tagging files.

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Is it possible to buy the Sonoma software or are there systems not for sale?

Vinyl Studio was my favorite. Unfortunately I own the device you are speaking of and I found it noisy and not useful. I bought the PS Audio NuWave and that makes very good recordings of LPs using Vinyl Studio. It is very good software in my opinion and well worth the little amount they charge for it. They also used to update it quite frequently. I haven’t used it in a few months though…

I’m guessing the NuWave is an older product. I don’t see it listed. I see a NuWave DSD and DAC in the legacy manuals but neither offers analog inputs so I don’t see how it would convert an analog signal from a turntable over to a digital one. I have a good phono card in my Mark Levinson preamp. Hopefully the noise aangern noted was coming from the phono stage on the Parasound.

I appreciate everyone’s input on the software. Vinyl studio seems to be the preferred. It’s very reasonably priced and I’d need it anyway to try the Parasound D to A I currently have. Since I still have a turntable and cassette this may be more work than I think it’s worth. I do have some analog material it would be nice to be able to listen to in the office and car.

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

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