Vinyl to CD with track separation, pop removal

[aldo12xu]

I finally got around to transferring my vinyl records to CD. After I captured the audio .wav files I was able to use Vegas Video to separate the tracks and burn a CD directly from the timeline.

I recently bought Movie Factory and now I'd like to try doing everything in MovieFactory so that I can apply the pop and scratch removal. But when I drag the audio files for two sides of a record into the MF's CD burning template, all I see are the two huge files with only one track separation between Side A and Side B.

How can I manually add track separation points within those huge files using MF before applying pop removal?

Thanks in advance!

[sjj1805]

I transferred my vinyl to the computer several years ago.
To clean up the audio and get rid of pops etc you shouldn't be using a video package - even if you intend to put it onto a video as a soundtrack.
What you need to use is an Audio Editor.

An extremely powerful FREE Audio Editor is Audacity.

Once cleaned up you can simply keep the audio files on your hard drive, nicely catalogued with Windows Media Player. Create albums and burn them onto a CD to play in your car on the way to work. Windows Media Player is good at achieving this.

Plus of course you can import them into MovieFactory, VideoStudio and other Video Related programs.

[DVDDoug]

I've never used Movie Factory for audio work either...

You can make a CD from individual WAV files, or from a single WAV file, and a cue sheet. The cue sheet method works well when you have a live recording and you can't have gaps between the tracks.

I don't know if Movie Factory can use a cue sheet. I happen to use CDRWIN. I assume Nero and Roxio can also burn from a cue sheet.

Any audio editor (including Audacity) can combine or split WAV files. For most of my audio editing, I use GoldWave ($45 USD). I've been using it for many years. It's a rock-solid program, and upgrades are free.

Vinyl noise removal is difficult (sometimes impossible), and it generally requires special tools. Standard "noise reduction" filters & methods don't work very well with this type of noise. My first recommendation is to buy the CD if its available.

Audacity has a Click Removal tool. (I've never tried it, but I don't think it's very "sophisticated".) There are lots of plug-ins available for Audacity, so if you choose to use it, you might want to search around to see what you can find. GoldWave also has an automated pop/click filter.

For vinyl "ticks" & "pops", I use Wave Repair. It offers several different methods for repairing defects. I've usually has the best results with a method that completely replaces the defect with the few-preceeding milliseconds of sound. The downside to Wave Repair is that it works best when you find & select the defects manually. It can be very time consuming... It usually takes me a full-day, or full-weekend to fix-up an LP!

For more information, the creator of Wave Repair has a website with lots of advice & tips on digitizing LPs. He includes links to several different vinyl "clean-up" programs, and he actually recommends a competitor's program for fully-automated clean-up.

The HydrogenAudio Forums are a good place for digital/computer audio information, and they've recently added a Vinyl forum.

I also have a short (~1/2 page) outline of the procedure I use for digitizing vinyl. This post is getting too long so if you'd like a copy of that, send me a private message.

[aldo12xu]

Thanks for the tips guys. I think I'll play with Wave Repair over the weekend. For now I did a quick and dirty fix by burning a CD with track separation in Vegas and then duplicating that CD in MF with pop reduction applied.......not a total elimination of pops, but a noticeable improvement.