Audacity
After reading an article in Popular Mechanics, I decided I'd try my hand at
transferring my wife's aging LP collection onto CD. The advantages of digitiz-
ing our vinyl collection seemed obvious, so I began to collect the pieces and
parts necessary to do the job. After spending a couple hundred bucks on the
hardware -- mainly due to the fact that the old turntable just wasn't up to the
job -- I was desperate for a free software solution.
Buried in the article was a reference to Audacity, so I jumped at the opportu-
nity to save a few bucks. The only thing missing in the program -- which only
makes its presence felt when you want to export your MP3s -- is the LAME
MP3 encoder. Audacity offers a host of other features as well; you can find
out about them by visiting their Web site at http://audacity·source
forge·net
. The Help page includes links to the FAQs, Documentation, and
Tutorials. Once you make it through those sections, you'll have a good work-
ing knowledge of the program.
If, like me, you're interested in converting your vinyl collection into a
CD collection, you can read the article that sparked my interest by visiting
www·popularmechanics·com/technology/audio/1552397·html
and
reading the "Vinyl to Go-Go" article.
Part VII: The Part of Tens
Downloading and installing
the LAME MP3 encoder
With most MP3 utilities -- at least the free
ones -- it's necessary to download and install
an MP3 encoder. The one most often recom-
mended is the LAME encoder, and you can find
it widely available on the Web by searching the
term "LAME MP3 encoder." A couple sites I can
recommend to download from are
Free-codecs·com: The link for the LAME
encoder is www·free-codecs·com/
download/Lame_Encoder·htm
.
Softpedia: The encoder can be found
here
www·softpedia·com/get/
Multimedia/Audio/Audio-CD-
Rippers-Encoders/LAME-MP3-
Encoder.shtml
.
This download is in the form of a ZIP folder, so I
suggest you download it to your desktop. (This
just seems to work best for me.) Once the
folder's finished downloading, you can open it
with WinZip or the Windows XP utility and
extract the contents to the location, such as
C:\Program Files\audiograbber
, at
which the Audiograbber or any other MP3 util-
ity resides.
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