Mark writes, “I’m still having troubles getting my vinyl records over to CD. I can’t find a good software product to lessen the pops and scratches. Any suggestions would be appreciated.”
My in-depth tutorial, Converting Vinyl LPs to CD details 6 potential solutions to Mark’s problem, including all the steps required to take the source record and convert it to a CD or digital audio file. One of the best new solutions for converting old records and cassettes to digital formats is Spin It Again. The application offers a wizard driven interface for capturing cassettes and records, including automatically splitting tracks and fixing any pops and scratches in the audio.
Depending on what other audio recording needs you might have, there are several good solutions for eliminating pops, cassette tape hiss, and scratches from digital recordings.
In the past I recommended Plus! Analog Recorder, which is part of the Digital Media Plus! Pack Microsoft offered back when Windows XP came out. The pop and scratch removal, licensed from Syntrillium Software before they sold out to Adobe, was the best on the market.
Adobe Audition is my personal favorite all purpose audio editing app. If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, Audition is included. With tons of built in effects, along with support for audio looping Audition is highly versatile. The Audition noise removal features are based on the same software included with Microsoft’s Plus! Analog Recorder. Audition also ties in with Adobe Premiere for editing movie audio. Newer versions include things like pitch correction for fixing off key singing and a vocal extraction tool, which is great for creating your own karaoke music. Audition is also one of the more expensive audio editing solutions, because of its large feature set, but it may also be the last audio editing tool you ever need.
Easy Media Creator from Roxio has a Sound Editor app with solid noise reduction features. As I detailed in a review of Easy Media Creator, it also comes with video and photo editing, along with numerous other features.