converting viynal to mp3

[puglover]

hi all,

a bit of a diverse topic i know lol but has anyone tried it here??

ive got a turntable connected to my lappy and im using the audacity software to capture the audio........

but..........

the sound captured is flat and lifeless.....

does anyone know of any better software or anything so i can add life to these once redundant musical masterpieces

something like a graphic equaliser prog or an all in 1 capture and equaliser

thanks all

[mjb]

You have two problems. First laptops have terrible soundcards which typically pick up LOTS of interference from the rest of the computer. You'll need a high quality external soundcard. Secondly MP3 is a lossy format - it creates an approximation of the source sound. If you care about sound quality you'll be wanting to use FLAC instead which is lossless (an exact replica of the source at the expense of more storage requirements). Later versions of Audacity should support FLAC natively.

[puglover]

hi mjb thnx for your advice ...i do have a top of range laptop and i have noted your advice on the soundcard issue which i will look into ......

i didnt know that the mp3 format lost so much quality i was under the impression that it was of a higher quality format that also kept the space tracks take up to a minimum.

hard drive space is not an issue for me as i have 250gb hd on board in sata form and also a external hd of 500gb also of sata conected to lappy via an external sata port on my lappy (i went for this option rather than using the usb2 ports)

ive tried audacity software and am not overly taken by it there's not many options for configuering user settings so was looking for an alternative.

i am very grateful to you for your help and advice.
btw have you any recomendations of external sound cards that you may have used or heard about?

[mjb]

hi mjb thnx for your advice ...i do have a top of range laptop and i have noted your advice on the soundcard issue which i will look into ......

Top of the range, bottom of the range, they all seem to use cheap audio chipsets. May as well really because there's no way they can keep interference in check in such a small electrically noisy case

i didnt know that the mp3 format lost so much quality i was under the impression that it was of a higher quality format that also kept the space tracks take up to a minimum.

High bitrate MP3s can sound pretty good - the LAME encoder in -v0 mode (target around 245kbps average VBR) is quite high quality. An "old school" 128kbit CBR MP3 sounds awful however.