The text of an email I sent explaining my process

I capture using a Sony RCD-W500C. I'm an advocate of doing the initial analog to digital conversion in a device that is not trying to multiprocess and is engineered as an audio component. I make my initial burn on a CD-RW disc so that I can backup and re-record if something goes awry. Normally, I use the CDR deck to put in the track marks on the fly using a button on the remote. The result is a standard CD format disc. Then I finalize the RW disc and move it to the PC. From there I rip it to the PC (using Media Player) as a mp3 at 196K sampling rate. Then I burn an archival copy of the disc onto a CD-R disc. Then I reuse the RW disc for the next album.

I'm trying to pay attention to the lossy vs non-lossy formats and avoid making unnecessary compressions and decompressions. However, there have been times when I didn't put a track mark precisely where I wanted it and rather than back up and rerecord the tracks, I'll go ahead and finish the recording and then after loading it into the PC, I'll use Goldwave to cut the tail end off the preceding track and paste it onto the beginning of the succeding track to adjust the track mark. I sometimes handle live albums in that way because it is often very difficult to peg the track marks on the fly. In such a case, I will likely make my archival copy CD as a burn from Media Player rather than from the RW disc. Also, if there are any major pops, I may fix them after getting it into the computer and again, compromise on the lossyness and make my archival copy from the PC. Assuming that I follow my standard procedure and make my archival discs as an exact disc copy of the RW disc (as it is about 90-95% of the time) then they are copies of exactly what I got off the LP. I may later edit the audio files on my PC for various reasons, but I don't typically replace the archival copy when I do this. So, what I typically listen to might be a slightly tweaked version. I try to stay on top of backing up my hard drive but depend on the archival CD copies as an ultimate backup. I'm balancing the potential loss of numerous edits to the music files on my PC if I were to lose my hard drive in a non-recoverable way VS. maintaining the archival copy as the original master of what came off the LP.

I think an audiophile purist would regard a disc copy of the archival CD as a generation better than a CD burned from Media Player. That being said, I don't think I can easily tell the difference between the two.

Based on my iPod having about 38 days worth of music on 80GB, my arithmetic is that I'm around 1.5 meg per minute. Perhaps I'd be at a meg a minute if I was sampling at 128K instead of 196.

Does this adequately explain how I'm doing this? I like to think that if my archival copy has been edited, I'd make a note of that in the DTR. I think I failed to do so for the recent Zappa/Beefheart/Mothers Bongo Fury transcription. Remember listening to that one in the Basement in our junior/senior years of high school? Anyway, the tracks pretty much run together and I adjusted the track marks as described above to fix it.

I've fooled around with other approaches, but after doing hundreds of albums, what I've described above feels like overall, the most efficient and effective way to resurrect the mass of vinyl I've been moving around the country and not listening to for decades. Trying to generate a homemade disc that "looks like" a factory-made disc makes it much easier to manage getting artist, title, date, composer, etc. data from the Internet rather than having to type it all in. It would be possible to record whole sides as a single track and then rip it to the PC and break it into tracks there and then get the album info from the web but if that was my standard operating procedure I think I'd want to rip it initially as a lossless format and then after breaking it into tracks I'd save it as an mp3 but that would involve geneating a temporary version on the PC. But at the same time, I'd be wanting to burn the archival copy of neither of those versions since one is not broken up into tracks and the other has lost a generation of quality.