Old Records Meet the iPod

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on November 14, 2005

For last several days I’ve been listening to this one particular John Lee Hooker album over and over on my iPod. But how I got this album on my iPod is a bit of a tale.

Some years back I read about a duet between two of my favorite musical artists: The late bluesman John Lee Hooker, and the 60s rocker Van Morrison. Before Hooker died in 2001, the pair did a handful of duets. Among their earliest collaborations, and apparently the hardest to find is one they did on Hooker’s 1973 album “Born in Mississippi, Raised Up In Tennessee” where Morrison plays guitar and sings on a cover of Freddie King’s “Going Down.” The main reason it’s hard to find is that the album, to the extent that I’ve been able to determine, has never been re-released on CD. That’s a shame in itself, but were it not for that fact I wouldn’t be writing about it here.

Some years ago I tracked down a copy of the album at a rare records shop here in New York. I bought it, but couldn’t readily listen to it, as I had long ago packed away my last turntable to make room for other more modern entertainment devices – DVD players, cable boxes, and the like. Since this was before the onset of the iPod, I figured that eventually I’d somehow be able to convert it to digital format and then burn a CD. This I never did, and so the record sat, sadly un-played, and collecting dust for five years or so.

It turns out to be worth the wait. A few weeks ago I picked up a small portable turntable, the PT01 from a company called Numark. The unit has a built-in pre-amp that makes it suitable for connecting to the audio-in port on my Apple PowerBook. And its small enough that when I’m not using it, I can pack it away in a closet.

Using a program from Roxio called CD Spin Doctor, which comes included with Roxio’s Toast 7 or a collection of iPod accessory programs called The Boom Box, I imported the entire album to my hard drive in WAV format. The program also helps you clean up the audio quality to eliminate the hisses and cracks that albums always seem to have.

Once I had tracks laid down in WAV format, I converted them into MP3 format, and moved them into my iTunes playlist, typed in the track names, and found an image of the album cover. The next time I synced up my iPod, they were showed up on my iPod under “John Lee Hooker.” I’ve been playing the album at least once a day ever since.

Now the process was time-consuming. Typically when you import music from a CD, it happens much faster than it takes to play. There's no way to speed up the importing process with a vinyl album. If you want the whole album, you have to play the whole thing. Plus you have to mind the sound settings, which can sometimes need adjustment as you go from one track to another.

Overall, I liked doing this, and will eventually get around to digitizing several more vinyl records I have lying around that I never managed to replace with CDs. Having this option might even rekindle my habit of digging around used record stores.

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