Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Vinyl to MP3 Project
Today is the last day of my holiday, and I decided to start in earnest on digitizing my vinyl record collection.

I put all of the necessary components together (turntable, amp, computer and various connections properly connected up), downloaded the latest version of Audacity and snagged the lame MP3 encoder and started testing things out. First thing I started with was an an old Deja Voodoo 7" single I have. The band once threatened to release material on CD, but never did, and at this stage likely never will. I was also interested in seeing if their music still stood up over time.

Had easy success with the single, and once I had the levels right it was simple to cut things in the right place and create both WAV and MP3 files of the results. Am not attempting to do any post-recording clean-up of vinyl audio artifacts such as clicks, pops and hisses -- will leave that for a later date, if ever. I went on to subsequently tackle a couple of Deja Voodoo albums: Cemetery and Too Cool to Live, Too Smart to Die without incident

Then the amplifer, an old Pioneer unit that once belonged to my parents and dated to the early 80s, began to utterly give up the ghost after so many years of disuse and then sudden reuse. So I got our more modern NAD amp from the dining room and immediately got better, more balanced results. I told our neighbour Dave what I was doing and he donated a better turntable in exchange for getting me to similarly digitize some classical albums for him.

As a result this is turning out to be a long term project than I had originally envisioned -- I was thinking of digitizing only those couple dozen or so albums I really wanted to hear again, but if the end result is more interesting musical selection for myself and my neighbours, it'll be worth it.

And as for Deja Voodoo, hearing them again after all these years reminded me how much their deliberately lo-fi esthetic influenced that of Miscellaneous 'S', (which only makes sense, since three members of the band, myself included, were big fans of Deja Voodoo). I'm not sure it really holds up, but it is fun to listen to again. I think some friends of mine can also expect an audio treat or two in the mail sometime soon as a result. ;-)