Q: iTunes Match - Best Tools for Vinyl 'Match'
What are the best tools for ensuring a good outcome with iTunes Match for Songs ripped from Vinyl?
It would be helpful to know for both Mac and Windows 7 PC - please include any sequences if known to work well.
Persumably a great sound card is needed to take source feed from high quality audio equipment - but beyond this what works best?
iTunes 10, Windows Vista, iMatch giving inconsistent results
Posted on Jan 30, 2012 8:24 AM
Selection of Tools
There are many 3rd Party tools that can assist from basic utilities such as ClickRepair to audio recording tools such as Audacity and Golden Records (http://www.nch.com.au/golden/index.html).
There are even bespoke service companies that will complete the conversion for you, for example http://www.vinyltodigital.co.uk/audio/vinyl-lp-to-cd.html.
Selection of Source
Working from the source, assuming that you have a good turntable and amplifier the next critical component is the Analogue to Digital conversion for entry of the signal into the Computer. A great article covering the basics can be found at http://www.planetoftunes.com/digiaudio/how_a_to_d.html.
Whilst it is possible to simply connect to the basic input of a standard sound card these are typically not of hi-fi quality and biased towards applications such as gaming. A good route is to look into USB 2.0 audio input devices such as ESI's Dr DAC http://www.esi-audio.com/products/drdacprime/. Or specialist devices such as ESI's Phonorama http://www.esi-audio.com/products/phonorama/. Other providers such as Behringer and Focusrite offer excellent alternatives. A helpful discussion on the alternates is provided at http://www.soundware.co.uk/pages/convertvinyl.php.
Inside Knowledge for iTunes Match
The key tips drawn from the posts by Roebeet and Jim are excellent, in particular
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16783085#16783085.
Overall
There are really two major objectives:
1. To add really good Vinyl recordings into the iTunes library;
2. To support a good chance of iTunes Match being able to 'match' Songs.
This thread really addresses (1), for a variety of reasons success with (2) appears to be c.20-40% which whilst good is clearly less than with digital source such as iTunes Store, CD Rips or Amazon.
Posted on Feb 1, 2012 1:11 PM