I added missing album support to the ripper last week. A missing album is album information without audio files. The ripper now provides creation of blank albums where the album/artist/label/track information can be looked up or entered. There is currently partial support for adding audio files after-the-fact via upload or drag into a directory. This quiet little feature is the wedge towards vinyl ripping.

I was talking to the great JD of MegaWatt Mahem fame on Tuesday, and he mentioned that he was ripping his large vinyl collection... to make it more manageable and easier to reference. He said it was a long and tedious task (as have others). The process requires much babysitting and is basically:

• clean the record - minimize the unwanted noise
• play and record - position the needle, hit record on audacity, start playing the record
• process (depop/denoise/normalize/etc) - apply audacity plugins to improve the capture quality
• mark tracks and split - identify silence in audacity and put track markers and split
• encode - encode each track to output format (flac, etc)
• rename - rename the output directory and track files appropriately
• tag - tag the output files appropriately

First off is auto recording. I did a bit of research this week, and I think it's possible via gstreamer (and gst-java). A line recording can be continually occuring and pipe to a level and a circular queue (buffer). The level can be tuned to trigger on volume detection, and cause the queue to dump to a file. This is nifty, as it is always recording (and discarding)... even with silence. On noise, the buffer is big enough to start saving directly to a wav file without missing a beat. Level detection logic could also be put in to identify track breaks and end of album. The processing could then be done via audacity scripting. Encoding could be done and then renaming and tagging from the information entered about the missing album. End result: operator has to clean the record and hit play... thats it!

With multiple soundcards (or multi multi-channel more likely), multiple tables could be setup (say 10) and recording would go _much_ faster (tho still slow in comparison to CD ripping).

A little nice subproject. Anyone want to help?