Editing your recordings

When it comes to editing your recordings we recommend you use the software program you are most familiar with. If you don't have any software then try Audacity, it's free, simple to use, works on PC and Mac and will meet all your requirements for editing vinyl recordings.

1. If you've recorded two or more tracks from one side of vinyl, make enough copy's of the original recording so each song has its own file.

2. Delete all the silence from the start of each track so that the music starts instantly. Leave a few seconds of silence at the end of a track.

3. Look and listen for pops and scratches in the recording. Locate any scratches in the track and decide, are they noticeable enough to be removed? If you think so, zoom in on the waveform close enough to see the individual samples in the wave and use a pencil tool to edit out the pop and re-draw the wave.





4. Normalise your recording. The normalisation process increase the volume of the audio up to it's highest possible level without clipping. To do this in Audacity select the audio by pressing ctrl-a. Go to 'effect' on the top of the screen and select normalise.

5. Save your finished AIFF files in a folder, when you've finished a recording session make a copy of the folder and archive it away. Always keep a folder of the original recordings stored on your hard drive, external drive or burnt on DVD.

Encoding your recordings

You can now play the AIFF recordings in Scratch LIVE, however if you want to reduce the size of the recordings you can encode them into a suitable MP3 format. We recommend you use iTunes. If you are new to iTunes this article explains how to get started with building and organizing your library of music.

Select which bit rate you want to encode your MP3's into by going Edit - Preferences - Advanced tab - Importing tab - Use the 'setting' drop down menu and select custom - from here you can select your desired bit rate. 320kbps is the highest quality. We have a more in-depth article about encoding the best sounding MP3 files.

Finally to encode AIFF files into MP3 format: Drag your AIFF files into iTunes, highlight them, right click and select 'Covert selection to MP3'. It pays dividends to complete all the tag fields, genre, artist etc, on each MP3 track. Right click on each MP3 and select 'Add Info' to fill in the tags.

It's a time consuming process turning records into digital files so if you decide to do it, it's worth doing properly, first time around. Good luck and enjoy.