How to digitise vinyl (re-visited)

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A year or three ago I wrote a short article on how to digitise your vinyl records to a digital format to play in the car etc.

How to digitise a Vinyl record (or a Cassette etc)

Time has moved on and I thought I would re-visit what I wrote to see if anything has changed. It has a little but not much.

The main change is that I am now “ripping” everything to FLAC rather than MP3. Truthfully there is not a lot of difference between 320kbps MP3 and FLAC but using top end equipment I believe I can hear it so it is now FLAC for me. This means that some stuff is being re-digitised.

The other significant change is that I no longer use Spin-it-Again but am now using VinylStudio by Aplinesoft to rip my vinyl records to FLAC.

Software being used is

VinylStudio – Windows software that “records” vinyl records to FLAC using a USB soundcard.
mp3tag – Windows software to tag FLAC files if other software can’t find the right data
dbPoweramp Reference – Windows software to rip CDs to FLAC (or other formats). Reference edition includes lookup to multiple online music databases for tagging.
Vortexbox – a headless server that autorips CDs to FLAC and is the home of one of my LMS installations.