How I convert my vinyl to mp3

For a lot of reasons I prefer vinyl to CDs as my primary medium for music. But I still want to carry my music around, and not only is vinyl rather heavy, the real killer is the lack of portable turntables that work while cycling...

A few days ago I packed one of my turntable and my old and crappy mixer into my bike trailer and hauled them and a selection of records to my office. Now I can listen to proper music while working, and convert it to mp3 at the same time.

As the setup is kind of interesting, here's a quick rundown through the hard- and software used:

The turntable connects to the mixer, which does the preamp needed to convert the weak signal from the turntable into something line-in can take. The mixer than connects to my USB sound device (rather ancient, I got it when we lived in Berlin in 2000). The USB thingy is plugged into my desktop machine (of course running Debian), where I use Audacity to record the audio signal.

After I recored a whole record, I have to do some manual fiddling to remove the gaps in the recording left when I had to switch records. I than add a 'label track' and add track marks at appropriate places (silence auto detecting just does not work good enough). Then I hit 'Export multiple' and let audacity convert the wavs to mp3.

Now I have a bunch of ugly-named mp3-files lacking proper meta data. I wrote several small scripts and tools to first rename the files to something like '01.mp3'. I fetch the CDDB data from freedb.org (or if I cannot find it there, I can write up a small file containing the meta data from hand or copy it from wikipedia). Another script then parses the meta data, finds the matching mp3 file, adds ID3 tags, moves it to my music archive and generates a proper filename (which of course is '02_guns_dont_kill_people_rappers_do.mp3').

And that's it!