This record­ing by Gene Shaw I pur­chased in the six­ties and it has always been one of my favorite jazz record­ings. Many of my old favorites have been released on CD but thus far not this one.

I had been think­ing about dig­i­tiz­ing it for a long time and final­ly today was the day. I still have my high qual­i­ty turntable and pre­amp from the six­ties so it was just a mat­ter of plug­ging them into my com­put­er and play­ing the record while record­ing the out­put of the pre­amp with my excel­lent Sound Forge soft­ware. After­ward Sound Forge has an easy tool to reduce the clicks and pops and then I saved the file in WAV for­mat to retain all the fideli­ty of the record. Using iTunes allowed the nam­ing of the artist, album, track, etc. as well as tran­scrib­ing it to Apple Loss­less for­mat for easy trans­fer to my iDevices.

It took me a few hours for this ini­tial LP –> dig­i­tal tran­scrip­tion. One of those was wast­ed try­ing to get the sound into the com­put­er. It turns out Win­dows 7 has this func­tion dis­abled by default so I ran around that bush for quite awhile until I searched the web and found an answer post­ed by anoth­er frus­trat­ed user.

Now that I have the tech­nique mas­tered I’m all set to make more of my old favorites portable and more eas­i­ly playable.