Recording vinyls

[elemental]

I know this has been covered before.. but the thread was pretty old.
I am now (finally) looking at recording vinyls for playing in live, all the tracks I can't find on proper digital release.

First of all, for the older ones, looking for good ways of cleaning the vinyls.

Then there is the signal chain.

I will use a Technics with a good, fairly new stanton DJ cartridge (cant remember which one) - should I get a better cartridge for this?
Going into a Stanton SK-1 mixer. Should buy or hire a better quality mixer?
Then probably will use my MOTU Ultralite Mk3 to record. I also have an RME Multiface but its in my tiny studio boxroom computer and I dont have room for a deck in there!

Cheers ppl, any advice much appreciated.

[mortalicious]

buy gruv glide to clean the records.

sony soundforge is great for click and pop removal.

save the files as .wav, then get a program like platinum notes to batch convert to mp3 320kbs.

i use a hhb recorder, run directly out of my mixer (no sound card in the loop, the less in the loop the better).

when you save the files its a good idea to save them according to genre (house, vocal house, progressive house, vocal progressive house, etc..)

a program like MIK is good to figure out keys and it also lets you create a excel file that you can easily sort to figure out artist, tempo, and key.

make sure there are no ground hums. the most annoying thing is recording hours and hours of vinyl and then realizing that something is wrong with the recordings (hums can come from your mixer, your computer, anywhere)...

good luck

[selthym]

x2 for soundforge. The 30 day demo is fully featured and lets you save, convert to MP3 etc. Plus for me it gives me a deadline so I don't get sidetracked.

[lord toranaga]

do not convert to mp3

just get a big HD and leave them as wav files.

much better sound quality

[elemental]

yep I plan to keep them as wavs for sure. 2 x 500GB portable drives on the way

so far.. I have ordered some stuff for cleaning records, inc new sleeves.
I will use the mixer out with high quality cable to my motu ultralite, and record as 24-bit wav, normalize and then convert to 16-bit.

I was more looking for advice on signal chain, needle/cartridge and mixer - will prob just use what I have for now though.

cheers ppl

[lord toranaga]

I have ove 1tb of recorded vinyl.

I love to "digital" digging

[cypher]

No need to normalize, as you will be recording them on the mixer at the same levels, like if you were mixing them ?