My latest side project has been digitising my vinyl collection to ultimately abandon Spotify by the end of the year.
Is this something I could have achieved by just plugging my laptop into the record player? Of course, but that comes with a number of limitations, mainly so - lack of portability.
Enter - my Raspberry Pi
Small, nimble, and perfect to sit on the back of the shelf unassuming. Having a micro-computer really shines in situations where the micro aspect can come in handy.
The Recipe
- 1 USB Enabled Record Player (Mine is the Audio Technica LP60XUSB)
- 1 Raspberry Pi with at least a USB port
- 1 USB-B to USB-A cable
Step 1 - Boot your Raspberry Pi
First things first, we assume your raspberry pi is already booted with something like Raspberry Pi OS, conected to your network, and SSH enabled. I do a headless set-up following this Tom's hardware guide.
Step 2 - Set up VNC
If you've set up SSH correctly, this is as easy as installing a VNC viewer client like TigerVNC on another device of choice, then connecting with your SSH credentials.
Step 3 - Install Audacity
Next, install Audacity on your pi & main device - it's a free audio recording and editor software. You can opt to only install it on the pi and do your editing directly via VNC, but I prefer transferring the raw files over and using the power of my desktop to split tracks.
Now you're ready to record!
Top tip: using a VNC viewer app on your phone makes it easier to walk around the house listening to the record and being ready to stop or pause the recording when you need to flip sides!
Now that you've recorded both sides of a record. The next step is to export the full (unsplit) audio as a .wav file.
I then use scp to transfer these files onto my main desktop for editing. Example usage of this (assuming current directory is something like raw-vinyl-albums:
scp <user>@raspberrypi.local:Music/raw/<album_name>.wav .
Now you have the the full album recording locally, you can use Audacity on your desktop to split tracks, export as mp3, add metadata & album art (check out MP3 tag) and transfer your new audio files to as many devices as you want since you own the files!
Yay for media ownership! And for integrating a raspberry pi into my vinyl setup!
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