Before the 1980s the preferred way of listening to high quality music was through the vinyl records. Then Sony came up with Walkman in 1979 and people started collecting audio cassettes. As a result, many older generation people have amassed hundreds if not thousands of vinyl records and cassette tapes. If you have also found dozens of audio cassette tapes or vintage vinyl records somewhere in your uncle’s basement, then you may want to convert them into MP3 files so that you do not have to setup a turntable or borrow your uncle’s tape player over and over again to listen to them.
For converting old vinyl records or audio cassette tapes, you can use Golden Records software. It offers you a wizard interface that takes you from one step to another easily. Here is how:
- Launch Golden Records and click on the “Wizard” icon in the toolbar. In the first step you have to choose whether you are using audio cassettes or vinyl records of different speeds. Depending on your choice it will display the connection schematic for all the devices. Basically, you have to use 3.5mm jack cables to connect the audio output from the turntable to your amplifier. Then connect the amp output to the audio-in port of your PC.
- In the second step, you have to check if the audio-in port is receiving proper sound quality and volume level. If volume is low, then adjust the amp to boost the volume. If you are getting too much noise then check for audio cable connections and any electromagnetic interference in the area.
- Third step involves starting the recording. This may take some around an hour. When the vinyl record has stopped playing, stop the recording and move on to the next step.
- Golden Records can automatically split all the recording based on the silence between the tracks. But if it has split a track incorrectly, then you can rejoin them back together. You can also split the tracks again or delete the spurious tracks.
- Since you are working with very old recording, there could be noise in the recording. In the fifth step, you can apply various filters to reduce the noise. You can also normalize the volume, equalize the recording, reduce click/pops from the tracks and more.
- In the final step, you are given options of exporting the recordings. You can save them as MP3 files or burn them as audio CD.
Golden Records is not free software and during the trial mode use, you can export only first two tracks from the recording. If you want to export all the tracks, you can purchase a license which is only $29.99.
You can download Golden Records from https://www.nch.com.au/golden/index.html