VinylStudio 13.1

Despite the rebirth of vinyl in the last few years, many music lovers and collectors would love to have a digital copy of their beloved vinyl records and cassette tapes that did not make it to the CD world. VinylStudio offers you all the tools you require to record your analog audio into your PC, clean up the recording and cut it into tracks, and save it to CD or keep it as uncompressed digital files.

The program covers the entire process, including the digitization of the analog audio itself. If you happen to have an audio file with a previous vinyl or tape recording, you can easily import it to the program’s main interface and take it from there. Setting up your copy of VinylStudio to start making analog-to-digital recordings make take some trial and error, but you’ll soon find that it’s worth the experimentation. In other cases, however, recording your analog audio may be as simple as selecting the right input channel and click on the Record button.

I would not say that this is a tool for audio professionals only – it is simple enough (once you’ve set up all your gear) to allow the average user to make their own recordings and clean-up processes correctly, but it is also true that if you want to digitize and process your analog audio in a professional way, you will need to have or acquire certain audio-related skills. The program supports the most common lossless (WAV, AIFF, FLAC…) and lossy audio codecs (Ogg, MP3…) and you can set the sample rate and the bit depth that better fit your requirements. Each supported codec comes with its own set of options to help you customize your recordings.

Turning your raw analog recording into a clean and nicely cut and tagged digital CD or set of files make take you a bit longer. The program is equipped with all you need to remove all artifacts (especially those annoying pops and clicks that populate our vinyl records) present in the final recording. Some are easier to remove than others, which may require a bit more expertise and certainly a bit more work. The program can help you slice your original recording into tracks automatically, though some recordings may need some manual cutting when silences between tracks are not easily detectable or simply not present.

VinylStudio comes also with a series of tools to enhance the final recording, such as noise reduction (especially useful to remove cassette tape buzzing noises in between tracks), graphic equalization, audio normalization, audio patching of damaged areas, etc. Finally, you may want to ask the program to seek for metadata on the Web about your recording and name and tag your files accordingly. Or you can do it yourself if you prefer.

The final step is to save your digital files for future use or/and burn them to CD and listen to them anywhere. VinylStudio is certainly a comprehensive utility that covers every single step of the audio digitization, clean-up, and storage. Regardless of the reason that moves you to digitize your analog audio collection, this is a tool that is certainly worth checking.