Thanks for your reply
I am using Audacity as my recorder. My PC is downstairs and my stereo system is upstairs. I would like to use my Xbox through Windows Media Centre to listen to my albums as I am recording them.............You know recording albums is a long process and I've got another 1500 or so to go. I don't want to be stuck in the basement while the sun is shining.
OK. I didn't fully realize what your setup was.
Offhand.....you're going to be downstairs every 15 or 20 minutes anyway to manage the turntable and flip the disc over. I've never even started Windows Media Center and wouldn't know an Xbox from a cumquat. I guess you have to decide how important it is to you to be able to listen upstairs as you record. I'd have little interest in fighting that, but maybe it's a quick fix. I dunno.
Like you, I have thousands of LPs, 45s, and 78s and once faced the same situation you are looking at.
I came to the conclusion that it was more efficient for me to re-acquire the songs in digital format, rather than record my own LPs. I re-acquired song by song, NOT LP by LP. So I did not bother looking for those songs on an LP that I did not particularly like. I ended up with my favorite 25,000 songs on mp3s, but none of it it "album" form. I had over 60,000 songs on vinyl and shellac, so over half of it I didn't re-acquire---mostly those songs on an LP that you don't much care for. Or the flip side of a 45 that did not appeal.
I do have some very rare things that have never been reissued and can't be found or re-purchased. I did transfer that stuff as you are doing, but that amounted to no more than 1% of my collection. I just could not face the prospect and tedium of manually recording thousands of LPs and then editing them properly. But it's up to you to evaluate the trade-offs involved.
If you have thousands of LPs, you are obviously a music lover to some degree, so I have to recommend the following app:
ClickRepair
It's a click and pop remover developed by Brian Davies, a retired Australian mathematician. It works ONLY on WAV files, but does an exceptional job. Quick, with a great interface and excellent manual. You can use its presets or use your own settings. It can batch process dozens of WAV files in one pass. Typically takes less than 1 minute per song. Maybe as little as 5 seconds if the song has few defects.
I often convert an MP3 to WAV so I can use ClickRepair on the song. Then convert back to MP3.
Free 30 day trial. $40 if you eventually buy it. You can Google it online. It's a download from his site.
As you may have found, Audacity has click and pop repair functions built-in, but it's much more time consuming than the Davies app. I used to spend as much as a half hour manually editing out clicks and pops from a single song with Audacity, but now just run it through ClickRepair in under a minute.
He also has another app aimed at noise reduction (primarily hiss type noise, rather than clicks and pops). I didn't buy it as I found that Audacity's noise filter works about as well.
Good luck on whatever path you choose. I don't envy you with a stack of 1500 LPs.
