VinylStudio
Description
Vinyl records and cassette tapes contain audio that hasn’t been digitized — recordings that aren’t available on streaming platforms, live recordings, out-of-print albums, home recordings and collections accumulated before the digital era. VinylStudio offers the full process of getting that audio into digital files: recording the audio from a turntable or cassette deck connected to a computer’s audio input, cleaning up the recording by reducing clicks, crackle, hiss and noise, splitting the continuous recording into individual tracks, adding metadata such as album title, artist and track names, and exporting finished files in MP3, FLAC, WAV or other formats.
AlpineSoft developed VinylStudio specifically for the record to digital transfer use case rather than as a general purpose audio editor, which gives the application a focused workflow designed around the particular tasks that vinyl and tape digitization require.
VinylStudio records from any audio input that the Windows or Mac OS sound system recognizes: built-in sound cards, USB audio interfaces, phono preamps with USB output, and dedicated turntable to USB devices. The recording interface features a level meter to monitor input gain both before and during recording, and a waveform display to update in real time as audio is recorded. Recording saves to a session file that VinylStudio stores with the metadata of the recording, saving the raw capture and cleaned result as two separate stages.
Vinyl records accumulate noise on the surface — clicks from dust particles and scratches, crackle from imperfections in the pressing — that breaks up the audio. VinylStudio’s click removal scans the recorded waveform for the sharp transients that clicks produce, separates them from the legitimate audio transients such as drum hits and consonants, and interpolates replacement audio from the surrounding waveform. The sensitivity and algorithm settings change to suit the condition of the record, from light surface noise to badly damaged pressings. Crackle removal deals with the lower level continuous noise that moderately worn records make.
Tape hiss from cassette recordings and background noise from older vinyl pressings are reduced using Vinylstudio’s noise reduction tool. The tool takes a sample of audio in which only the noise is present — usually a silent gap between songs — and uses that noise profile to detect and eliminate the same noise profile from the rest of the recording. The reduction strength adjusts to balance between reducing noise and the risk of introducing processing artifacts in the music signal.
A continuous side of an album recording is divided into individual tracks by inserting split markers at the start of each song. VinylStudio helps with placement by identifying gaps of silence between tracks and suggesting split points for the user to review and adjust. Each track is given a name and the track list imports from Gracenote’s database by matching the album’s track sequence to online metadata where the album is identified.
VinylStudio communicates with the Gracenote music database to search for album and track metadata by artist and album name. Matched metadata automatically fills in track titles, artist, album, year, and genre fields. The Discogs database is an alternative lookup source for albums that are not in Gracenote’s catalog. Metadata manually edits recordings that are not in any database.
Completed recordings export per track as MP3, FLAC, OGG Vorbis, WAV, AIFF, Apple Lossless or WMA. Batch export applies to all tracks in the session at once, saving each one to the output folder configured in the tool, with filenames based on the metadata. Direct transfer to iTunes and Windows Media Player integrates the export into an existing music library without the need for manual file moving.
An equalizer makes frequency adjustments on a per-session basis — to correct tonal imbalance in recordings from equipment with non-flat response, or to apply the RIAA correction manually for turntables that don’t include a phono preamp. Track normalization is the process of increasing the peak level of each track exported so that the volume of the tracks on the same album is consistent.
