Grooves to ones and zeros
A reader of this site recently emailed me asking how exactly I went about digitising my vinyl collection as he plans to do the same. So I'm going to explain it to you all how I did it in tedious meticulous detail, and also give some hints on how to do it slightly differently if you don't want to spend all the cash I did on various bits of equipment.
First of all, and I'm going to spell out all the obvious bits too, you need a record player. If most of you are DJs then you probably own a Technics 1200 or 1210, I own a pair of 1210s, I think the black looks nicer than the silver 1200!
Secondly, you need something that will amplify the record player's audio signal, because due to the way records are cut they use a special equalisation process called RIAA equalisation (or equalization if you're American and like overusing the letter Z) to remove a lot of the low end so the needle doesn't skip. For 99% of you DJs this is already done by your DJ mixer. All DJ mixers with phono inputs correctly amplify the phono signal, however some mixers do it better than others. In my case I decided not to use a DJ mixer at all, instead I bought a dedicated phono preamp from Graham Slee (I got the Gram Amp 2), but that's because I'm an audiophile wannabe nerd (I stress the wannabe). You don't need a dedicated phono preamp, your DJ mixer should be fine.
Thirdly, you need to get the audio into your computer somehow. A lot of computers/laptops have a dedicated "audio in" or "line in" socket built in, it's usually a 3.5mm jack (the same kind of plug your walkman headphones plug into). To connect this to your DJ mixer you need an RCA (those red and white double connectors) to 3.5mm jack cable, most audio shops have them (Peats and Maplins do them in Dublin if you feel like being overcharged!), they look like this. The built in audio in ports on computers don't always give amazing results though, the analogue to digital converters (A/D converters) in this case are probably pretty cheap. Buying a dedicated soundcard may give better results, you can start off cheap with the M-Audio stuff or go mental and get an Apogee Ensemble or something similar. I used a Motu 828II which is a pretty decent device in my opinion, but is maybe a bit of overkill just for recording your records (I bought it ages ago to record the music I try to make). There are lots of soundcards out there so I won't go through them all here but people can always leave comments if they want opinions on any (the RME Fireface ones are really good too!)
Thing the fourth: Now we have audio coming into our computer. The next step is to choose a program to record it, and to figure out what type of file we want to save it as. There are hundreds, if not thousands of programs out there that can record audio. The people at Infinite Wave did a comparison of sample rate converters of a load of different programs which could give you an idea of the quality of each one, but that's strictly for the chin strokers who use phrases like "Fast Fourier Transform" in daily conversation. Personally to record the audio I used Adobe Audition 2, but most people using Windows seem to prefer Soundforge. On OS X I think Bias Peak is pretty popular. Yes, technically you could use Ableton Live to record the audio, I didn't because I think Ableton's wave editing features are a bit lacking, and I'm used to all the shortcuts in Adobe Audition. There are countless other programs out there you could use, Goldwave used to be pretty popular when I was in college so I thought I'd mention that one too.
Fifthly: The last big thing is to decide what format you want to store your files in. I recorded everything as a CD quality (44.1Khz 16bit) .wav file, and my entire record collection is currently taking up about 600 gigs of hard drive space. A lossless compression format like Flac will roughly half this size, mp3s are even smaller again but you start losing information and personally I'd rather keep the quality as high as possible. However most people nowadays seem happy with 320kbps mp3s, it's weird how as technology progresses the quality of audio that most people listen to is getting worse rather than better!
A few extra tips: a lot of your recordings will have clicks and pops in them, depending on the condition of your records. I've found Adobe Audition's pop+click remover really good at getting rid of these as long as you select just the pop itself and no audio around it. This can take some time if you're working on records with a few scratches. Also when I finished getting rid of the pops I usually normalise the audio (a process which increases the volume of the audio clip until just before the loudest part clips, not to be confused with compression or limiting which I wouldn't recommend as it messes with the dynamics of the audio).
So that's it! Any questions or comments or obvious mistakes to point out then please leave let me know!