Anyone with a long interest in audio who has bought a CD writer, will have thought about transferring a selection of favourite albums recorded on vinyl or cassette tape to CDR. What follows is a collection of tips that will help you to do so.

The suggested method is not the only way to do this, and other enthusiasts will offer different approaches. For example have a look at Alan Reny's web site, linked from my 'Favourites' page

As you become familiar with the techniques involved, you will develop your own ways of doing things.

The source is, of course the turntable system and/or cassette player that will provide the signal to the sound card on the PC and its analogue to digital converter.

Much has been written about the relative merits of different sound cards, but writing from the perspective of someone with a lifelong interest in audio (and old enough to have tried most things) I can say that the sound card, and its A to D conversion, is not going to be the weakest link in the chain.

Remember when thinking about soundcards that with most common products, you are buying surround sound processing and assorted synthesizers aimed at the games market and which have no purpose for the task in hand.

The sound card itself will have a stereo line input. On motherboard implementations this will be directed to a 3.5mm stereo jack on the rear of the case, otherwise it will be found next to the speaker connection on the card itself.

Some sound cards will have a 'break-out' box which brings the connections to the front of the PC (or separate from it) but such features only aid connection. They are not essential to obtain good results.

Any turntable worth using for this task will be fitted with a magnetic cartridge. Whatever cartridge type you use, it will require the assistance of a pre-amplifier to provide gain, and RIAA equalisation. This will usually be provided by your audio amplifier and the way to get that signal into the sound card is to connect the PRE-AMP or TAPE OUT connections to the sound card's LINE IN.

Clearly the better signal you begin with, the less editing will be required and the better the results. First class turntable systems cost a lot of money. How far you go with this will be determined by your level of commitment. I personally use an Ariston RD80 turntable with an SME Series II tone arm fitted with a Shure M97HE magnetic cartridge. These are not intended to represent the best of record playing equipment, but were largely determined by two factors:

1. I use a PS Audio PSIII phono pre-amplifier. This long obsolete black box is, in my opinion, one of the finest moving magnet cartridge pre-amplifiers ever produced, and was unrivalled at its price.

2. The choice of phono cartridge. Obviously this had to be a moving magnet device, to match the pre-amp. A Grado Signature 4 would have been my preferred choice for sound quality with the PSIII, but the Shure offers superb tracking, and has the advantage of a little damping brush that sweeps dust from the groove in front of the stylus.

The Shure cartridge works fine in the SME arm and the arm works well with the Ariston. The combination is better than the sum of the individual components. 

Whichever turntable system you use, track the cartridge at the highest recommended tracking weight to ensure that mis-tracking is, as far as is possible, eliminated.

A cassette tape player will not require the help of a pre-amp to provide sufficient gain and can be connected directly to the sound card. Cassette decks suffer from wow and flutter, so again the better the player, the better the results are likely to be. They also have heads which will gather oxides from the tape. This will impair the sound quality - especially the higher frequencies - so make a point of cleaning the heads with a liquid cleaner (isopropyl alcohol solution) and cotton buds before recording each side of the tape.

You can often get away with connecting the headphone output of a tape player (which has no line out) to the line input of the sound card, but NEVER connect to the microphone (MIC) input. PC microphone inputs are almost invariably single channel mono.

Just as you can select which audio inputs you can hear, you can also separately select which input you record. This can be selected from some recording software, or directly from the Windows soundcard mixer.

 This is accessed by double clicking the icon in the system tray and selecting, 'properties'  -   

Check only the LINE-IN box

I have no strong feelings about recording software. However for this task you are recording to uncompressed WAV format and not to WMA, MP3 or any other lossy compressed format. This will produce large files on your hard disc, but it does allow the best possible sound quality and makes later editing a simpler process.

I frequently use the Creative Recorder that came with my sound card, but I usually recommend CDWAVE which has a couple of advantages over others:

1. The latest versions will allow you to append a recording to the end of another, which, while not an essential requirement, is a useful option.

2. The software will allow you to split the resulting WAV files into separate tracks, either automatically or at places of your own choosing.

When recording from analogue sources, there are inevitably parts of the recording that will be discarded from the recorded WAV file, before it is transferred to CDR. These may include the lead-in and lead out on each side of a vinyl disc or cassette, and advertisements etc from FM or VHS TV recordings.

CDWAVE makes removal of such unwanted sections child's play. Mark the section to be removed as though it was a simple track, then uncheck the box at the start of the row. E.g. in the above screen shot, to remove the track 'Love Is On The Way', uncheck the box at the start of the line. Then when the file is saved, only the checked sections are split into new files.

NOTE: In the above illustration, the track names have been loaded from a cue sheet. CDWAVE does not have the facility to prepare track names based on the content, but does so based upon the wav filename.

CDRCue is, as its name implies, a Cue sheet editor. The cue sheet was developed as an aid to CD writing by the writers of CDRWIN, but several applications, including the popular Nero writing software, can make use of cue sheets.

Cue sheets give the user much more control over the writing process. CDWAV will produce a cue sheet from the splits added to a WAV file

PERFORMER "Robbie Williams"
TITLE "Live At The Albert Hall"
FILE "D:\Sound Data\Williams\BBC Recording02.wav" WAVE
TRACK 01 AUDIO
TITLE "Introduction"
PERFORMER "Rupert Everett"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "D:\Sound Data\Williams\BBC Recording03.wav" WAVE
TRACK 02 AUDIO
TITLE "Have You Met Miss Jones"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "D:\Sound Data\Williams\BBC Recording04.wav" WAVE
TRACK 03 AUDIO
TITLE "Mack The Knife"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
etc.

CDRCue (below) is particularly useful if you wish to add the CD Text information shown in the above example, to provide track names for those players that can make use of it - (which in practice is not that many, so don't lose sleep over any lack of ability of your player in this area).

Even when the player can display text, there is no guarantee that it will display it correctly as intended.

It is also worth noting that most PC based players will not handle CD Text either.

There's a simple CD Text capable player linked from my 'Downloads' page

Text does have its uses for transferring track information to labelling software and is thus worth including - and who knows, your next player purchase may be capable of using text?

A quick way to produce a cue sheet from a collection of audio files, albeit without text information, is to load the files into the write module of Exact Audio Copy, and then from the 'File' menu 'Save Cue Sheet'.

The cue sheets produced by Exact Audio Copy add functionality to the original Goldenhawk cue sheet specification. In particular you can add files as index entries. Cues with such entries may be used within Exact Audio Copy, but not with CDRWIN, Nero or CDRCue.

The only example I can think of where this might be relevant would be with a live recording, split not only at the start of the tracks but at the start of inter-track chatter, which you might wish to identify by index, as in the following example:

FILE "D:\Sound Data\Williams\BBC Recording04.wav" WAVE
TRACK 03 AUDIO
TITLE "Mack The Knife"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "D:\Sound Data\Williams\BBC Recording05.wav" WAVE
INDEX 02 00:00:00
FILE "D:\Sound Data\Williams\BBC Recording06.wav" WAVE
TRACK 04 AUDIO
TITLE "There May Be Trouble Ahead"
INDEX 01 00:00:00

Because of the file loaded as INDEX 02, the cue cannot be used with applications other than EAC. There are ways to work around this. For example, most WAV editors make re-combining WAV files a simple operation; you could split the file at the start of the inter-track chatter, and then insert an index entry with CDRCue; or you could leave the file whole and add all the track and index information with CDRCue. The best approach will determined by the nature of the files you begin with and what you are trying to achieve. In many cases a combination of approaches will provide the best results.

When copying analogue audio to digital media, especially when the source is vinyl disc, there will inevitably be a raft of unwanted pops clicks and other extraneous noises. You are going to have to consider what, if anything, you are going to do with them.

Whatever you do will be ultimately deleterious to the sound quality. You cannot take away unwanted noise, without taking away from the underlying music!

This is not to say that you cannot improve the listening experience.

Recording software such as Nero and EAC comes with editing software that can help reduce unwanted noise, clicks etc., but these are inevitably blunt instruments that will have difficulty distinguishing between (for example) clicks and required transient information. You may like the results, but overdo the filtering and the result will be a travesty of the original music.

Few automatic processing tools have ever been able to even approach the results achievable with time consuming manual editing, but one tool comes very close and that is Groove Mechanic from Coyote. For all but the most demanding situations, this application will do an effective job of removing the worst effects of pops, clicks, hiss and rumble without destroying the musical integrity of the original.

The following illustrations reveal the before and after presentation of the short demo clips, which you can download and hear for yourself.

Once you have your WAV file and cue sheet (or WAV files) you can use any writing software that takes your fancy that is compatible with your writer. Nero is the obvious choice as this comes packaged with many popular writers. I personally like Exact Audio Copy. You can use these or any other you may prefer.

A point to be aware of is that domestic CD players were never intended to play copies recorded on CDR/CDRW material. Very few will play audio recorded on CDRW media and most will only play CDR media thanks to latitude in the designed spec. of the players. Interestingly some DVD players will not play CDR media, but will play CDRW.

In order to give the player the best possible signal to work with, you need to ensure that you write at the optimum speed for the writer with the given media. While you might get away with recording data at high speeds, you may not be so lucky with audio.

Some writers e.g. the recent models from LiteOn employ 'Smart Burn' technology which sets the write speed appropriately, but for writers without such technology, you are going to have to experiment to find the optimum speed for the chosen media. In any case use a speed that does not cause 'Burnproof' to activate.

You do not have to use 'Audio' spec CDR discs. These are for stand-alone CD copiers. However as these discs must be capable of writing at 1X, to ensure compatibility with stand alone recorders working in real time, they may provide a means of extending the working life of an old writer incompatible with recent high speed media.

If using a cue sheet, Nero has an obscure command 'Burn Image' on the 'File' menu which will accept cue sheets. Otherwise use the 'Audio CD' tool and add the individual WAV files. Burn DAO (disc at once).

With Exact Audio Copy, click the WRI icon then from the 'File' menu 'Load Cue Sheet' or from the 'Layout' menu, uncheck the 'Add 2 sec gap on append' which is rarely required, but set as default, and then 'Append Files as New Track (Index 1)' which will cover most requirements.

Because of a limitation in Windows, if you select all the files in a folder, the order in which the files are assembled is likely to be wrong. This is easily corrected by means of the single and double arrows adjacent to the assembly window which will move a selected file up or down one space or to the start/end respectively.

Finally from the 'CD-R' menu 'Write CD..' You will get an error message if there is no disc loaded.

 Exact Audio Copy does not set the ability to write CD Text by default. If you require text information, ensure that you set the drive options to reflect the writer's ability to write text. If you don't know whether the writer is Text capable, run the write test of EAC's drive tests and apply the results.