My goal: to convert vinyl records into CDs.
For hardware, I bought the ART Phono Plus 2 USB phono preamp (see my review of it under that product listing) and used my old turntable.
The Phono Plus comes with Audacity software, a freeware package. Since I am in the Windows PC world, the choice was either that, or Spin-It-Again.
Spin-It-Again is rather expensive. I bought it through Amazon, which means I got a CD-ROM. It cost me $44 including shipping. I'm not sure I see the advantage to owning the CD. The program can be downloaded from Acoustica for $35, or from Kelly Music for $30.
There are many people talking about each product, but unfortunately I was not able to find a single review comparing the two. And I won't be able to provide one either, because I ended up buying Spin-It-Again, and have never tried Audacity.
Everyone talks about how difficult Audacity is to use, and how easy Spin-It-Again is. I can vouch for the ease of Spin-It-Again. The main interface has 3 buttons: record a vinyl LP, record a cassette tape, and load a sound file. The only other thing is a Settings button.
I am fairly computer-savvy, so I thought I'd be able to figure out how to work with Audacity, even if it is difficult to use. But what clinched it for me was that several people said Audacity's click and pop removal introduced strange sounds into the music, whereas everyone raved about Spin-It-Again's click and pop removal.
Once again, I can vouch for this. The "Vinyl declick and decrackle" setting is absolutely magical! I tried it with one of the worst albums I own, one I bought at Goodwill. Applying the decrackle post-processing virtually removed every single flaw without otherwise affecting the music at all!
This is the primary reason to buy Spin-It-Again, in my opinion. The quality of the recordings it makes is superb.
The software is fairly easy to use. It is also rather "foolproof." This is achieved at the expense of flexibility, of which Spin-It-Again contains very little. What there is is in the Settings, which are accessible from any page. There is no User's Manual. But the Help is pretty good.
I had to set it up to play what I'm recording out my computer speakers. This was in addition to what I had to do after I installed the Phono Plus.
Spin-It-Again has a hardware hookup wizard, which I found both confusing and useless for setup using the Phono Plus. The Phono Plus is so easy to hook up, however, that I eventually just quit out of the Wizard, because I was certain I had everything hooked up correctly (which proved to be the case).
The first step in digitizing a record is optional, but I don't see how it's possible to get a quality recording without doing it. That is running Spin-It-Again's Level Setting Wizard. This samples input from the turntable for 30 seconds, at the end of which, it tells you to turn up or down the preamp (at which point it samples another 30 seconds), or that the recording level has been set. This must be done for each album that is being digitized. The loudest part of the loudest song on the album must be used for this, which may be a problem if you can't remember the exact content of the records you haven't played for ten or twenty years.
Once the level has been set, the next step is to digitize the album. This is a 2-step process: put a record on the turntable and click the Record button in Spin-It-Again. That's all there is to it! One thing I really like is that you can hit Pause in Spin-It-Again at the end of a side, flip the album over, and then continue recording to the same sound file, ending up with a single .wav file for the entire album.
The next step is to let Spin-It-Again find the gaps between tracks. Again, here, the software performs well. For albums that have clear spaces between tracks, it usually finds them perfectly.
Anything else, such as tracks that fade into one another or have slight silent pauses in them, must be marked manually. That is the next page of the process. On the Preview page, Spin-It-Again plays the beginning and ending of each track for you, so you can see if you like it. This is one place I find it helpful to have Spin-It-Again's Voice Assistant turned on. An entire track can also be played by moving the "play" cursor through the waveform.
The number of tracks should be counted. If there are more tracks than are actually on the album, there is an Analyze button where you can set a minimum track length, gap between tracks length, etc.
If you still don't like where the track begins or ends, it must be adjusted manually. This is done with sliders in the waveform, with the aid of a Zoom button, if necessary. The sliders are easy to move, but I wouldn't say they are easy to control. I especially found it difficult to recover from a mistake. Another "fool-proof" feature that I'm not sure I like is that the master sound file is modified with each movement, without asking you whether or not you want to Save.
The waveform must be searched visually. Any areas which are gray but contain a waveform are probably actual music that Spin-It-Again has placed in a no-man's land. The sliders must be used to include this area in the proper track (usually the one before it).
Once you are satisfied with the track distribution, the next page lets you type in the titles of the tracks. Spin-It-Again enters the time of each track for you. There is a database search button which will find actual album information, but this has not been of use to me so far -- none of the albums I have digitized are in the database. In that case, you have to type in the name of each track manually. This has two annoying "features." First, if you discover after typing in the track names that there are too many tracks, and go back to the Preview page to fix that, all the info you typed for the tracks gets erased. Second, if you quit out of the page, without hitting the Next or Previous buttons first, all the info you typed for the tracks gets erased. So you have to type it all in again.
After you have finished typing in the tracks titles, the next page again has few choices. You can burn a CD or make .wav, .mp3, .ogg or .wma files. You can back up the .wav file of the full recording. (This makes a copy, which is time-consuming. I find it easier just to rename the original file and its companion .sia file.) You can make a new recording, which you would think would be no different than closing and then re-invoking Spin-It-Again. However, it has the additional, completely unwarned-of "benefit" that it unrecoverably wipes out all your track adjustments and erases all the track info you typed in!!!
The CD burner is anything but general purpose. It will only work on the loaded sound file. And there is no way to load more than one sound file at a time! Spin-It-Again finalizes every CD it burns, so you can't go back and make a second pass.
This means that you can't burn more than one album onto a CD, unless you record the albums into a single original file, by using pause. This is a ridiculous limitation. I want to have my digitized albums stored one album per .wav file on my computer, but 80-minute CD's will easily hold two of most record albums. Maybe Acoustica makes some other product that they're trying to extract some more money out of me for that would allow me to do this.
Making multiple copies of the CD isn't easy either. You can make multiple copies by setting a counter, the first time you burn. If you want to go back later, you have to load the original sound file, hit the Next button enough times to get to the burning screen (hoping you don't accidentally change something in the process), and re-burn a new CD. You can't just copy an existing CD.
Finally, you get to the part of the software that I found quite disappointing. You can print an insert for the CD you just burned. This is where you discover that, in order to avoid typing in all track information manually, a second time, for every CD you burn, you have to shell out another $15 to purchase the CD Label Maker upgrade!
I was quite outraged at this, and tried for several days to find a reasonable work-around. Spin-It-Again is designed to make this virtually impossible, as it will not allow you to copy and paste the track lengths from the editing page. I finally ended up paying them the $15.
Once you do that, it is very easy to import the tracks info from Spin-It-Again into CD Label Maker. You just hit a button. At that point, it is very difficult to change the way it lists them, and the defaults it uses are unpleasant to me. See my review under Acoustica CD/DVD Label Maker 3 to get further details on the shortcomings of that product.
You can also import cover art. I photograph the cover of the album and import the .jpeg file into CD Label Maker.
S U M M A R Y (in order of importance):
Spin-It-Again ...
. has incredible click-and-pop removal post-processing that makes extremely high quality recordings
. can burn a CD and/or create .wav, .mp3, .ogg or .wma files
. is missing extremely important functionality, namely the ability to print track information on a CD label. (To get that functionality, you have to fork over an additional $15!)
. divides recordings into tracks automatically
. has a CD burner which will only allow burning of one single original file onto a CD
. has a recording Level Setting Wizard
. can look up track information in a database
. allows manual adjustment of track begin and end markers
. is relatively easy to use
. automatically populates track length information in tracks listing
. lacks flexibility, and contains some "features" that are so user-unfriendly that I'm tempted to call them "bugs"
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Expedited Available
"SPIN IT AGAIN IS SUPERB"
"Superior Sound Quality; Missing Crucial Functionality; Easy To Use; Some Bugs"