Vinyl to CD - suggestions?

[JRV]

Keith, thanks for your reply.

Clean has all sorts of digital cleanup (hence the name) features. Removes pop, hum, hiss, and a bunch of other stuff. They're not just filters, they analyze the waveforms to do it (when set correctly) without removing music along with the noise. It has a preview mode for each correction that lets you hear only what it's removing to ensure the settings aren't too aggressive. When it's set right, which, at least in my brief experiments on a copy of Genesis' Duke that had a hard life, it actually seems to be able to do it automatically, all you hear is noise...no music. Pretty amazing.

You can also have it compensate for the compromises inherent in vinyl, like dynamic range and so on. I haven't quite decided how I feel about that vis-a-vis artistic intent, but I plan to experiment with it and will likely use it to some limited extent. It splits tracks automatically except, of course, where the songs run together and there isn't a silent lead-in track, as is the case with a lot of prog! In those cases, I'll have to intervene, but it's easy enough to do after-the-fact, and having the timings from the record label should help place the break correctly.

Wish there was a feature that knew how to compensate for eccentric spindle holes; I have many of those!

Perhaps your deck does this, but I have to be able to output files in CD-Audio ("Red Book") format so it can be played in a conventional CD player (not MP3, WMA, or other data format). That's important because my car CD changer doesn't know about data, and I don't plan to replace the car any time soon. Clean does that, although it will also do .MP3 and .WAV.