Your eyes do not deceive you! Brandon said farewell to the Gnook last Friday, but due to an editor’s fudge, it was discovered that we still had a few of Brandon’s columns in reserve. Unless another such as-yet-unseen fudge is revealed, this is really the last one! Enjoy!

Recently we’ve talked a lot about ripping physical media (cassettes, vinyl) in the Gnewbie Gnook, and on top of my words of advice, Stan wrote in to offer his thoughts on a program that he thinks the Lockergnome community should be aware of.

I have a small bunch of old LPs that I’ve been wanting to rip to CDs for a looooong time now.

I recently tried Audacity, but couldn’t get beyond its interface. I’ve been having such good results with another program that I saw no reason to go to something else. Although Audacity is more sophisticated, Rip Vinyl is much easier to use.

I’ve been using RIP Vinyl by Wieser Software for maybe a year now. Look for it at www.ripvinyl.com.

The only drawback to RIP Vinyl is that they want some bucks for it. You can download the demo version, and at about 2.5M, it’s a relatively quick download even for a dialup connection. When you install it, it places a tone a few seconds into your recording, and then every so often. When you pay for it, you get a code to take the tone out.

When I bought it, I had to pay $7US. I clicked a link and paid with a credit card via PayPal, and got my number e-mailed back in less than a minute. I think it’s $10US now.

I usually like the free stuff, but this was so cheap, and I had LPs I wanted to make into CDs, so I went for it.

RIP Vinyl is fairly intuitive, and is easy to learn. It has a button that opens Windows Recording Controls, which are similar to Windows “Master Out” volume controls, but set for recording.

RIP Vinyl has a slider for Master Volume, and controls (sliders) for Track Detection: Silence Level, New track after so many seconds of silence, and Discard tracks shorter than blank seconds.

It also comes with a help files that details how to hook up your turntable, complete with photos of the cables and / or adapters you’ll need.

I plug my turntable’s two RCA cables into Female-to-Female adapters, and plug longer RCA cables into the adapters. At the computer I have a 1/8″ stereo plug with two female RCA sockets on it. I plug this into the Audio Input. Now anything I play on the turntable I can hear on the computer speakers, and see the signal on the indicators (VU meters) on the program. Tell it where to save the wav files, put the needle on the record and hit Start. When you hit Stop it automatically saves what you’ve done as a WAV file.

RIP Vinyl does not make CDs; it just makes 44.1 KHz Stereo WAV files that are easily ripped to CDs or to MP3 files.

I found my installation of Roxio CD Creator has a waveform editor that I sometimes use to get rid of the needle noise at the beginning and end of recordings.

Take a look at it, I think you’ll like it.