It occurred to me one day, staring at a wall of Classical vinyl, that my kids will almost certainly never listen to any of this if I don't sit them down and play something for them--and of course a few years down the road they simply won't be able to play any of it without paying insane audiophile prices for a turntable and arm and cartridge and needles and yadda yadda. So I've started digitizing it now (favorites first of course--lots of encounters with old friends lately!)

The valentine for Audacity is because it provides (free-as-in-speech + free-as-in-beer) everything I need for the computer end of the project. I began by reading several detailed how-tos on digitizing your vinye and they all say you need this package for capturing the raw wav file and that package for removing vinyl hiss and clicks and pops and the other package for exporting the mp3s and tagging them with metadata. Well, Audacity captures. Audacity (latest version) archives your raw capture file with FLAC lossless compression, about half the size of wav files (I'm saving all the raw captures in case I want to re-do the compressed version of a given piece later because I learned more about exporting good mp3s, or decide to switch to ogg, or some better format appears.) Audacity plus lame_enc.dll exports mp3s. Audacity does noise reducion and click/pop reduction. Audacity normalizes. Audacity compresses in the reduce-dynamic-range sence(I make compressed files for playing in the car, where road noise interferes with the ppp passages.) Audacity slices! It dices! It darns socks and fixes leaky roofs. Use it in the home! The office! On fruits! Audacity rules.

Yah, Audacity! I was thinking I'd make some kind of Obama hope joke, but I don't know if I'm up to it.

Yup, Audacity is my first choice when I am doing any kind of music processing.

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