Converting records with a USB turntable and Raspberry Pi Peviously I left a laptop sitting by my record player running Audacity but that was inconvenient so I stuck a Raspberry Pi over there and run these commands via SSH.

I am not an expert, I’m just using the equipment I have so please don’t interpret this as “the best way to convert records”

Components:

• Record player with USB output (AT-LP120XUSB)
• Raspberry Pi (Using a 3B but probably anything will work)
• NAS

Prior Art:

• Hi-Fi analog to digital with IceCast
  Utilizes IceCast to stream audio around your network. Involves running several services and is primarily focused on streaming.

• PiDeck
  A system for DJing with your turntable, not for converting

• Z-LiveRec
  This is an interesting piece of software but is built as a desktop application. I’d rather run everything from the command line. If it had a web interface I would consider purchasing it.

• Ripping Vinyl Records on a Raspberry Pi
  This is very close to what I am doing! Ed describes some issues writing to his local storage and file server but I haven’t noticed anything similar. Perhaps he was using an older Raspberry Pi? (I’m using a Raspberry Pi 3)

My Setup:

1. Connect Raspberry Pi to record player via USB

2. Ensure mount directory exists and mount the NAS via SMB

   mkdir -p /tmp/nas;
   sudo mount.cifs //nas.local/home /tmp/nas -o user=daniel,nounix,uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -g)
   

3. Change to the relevant directory

   cd /tmp/nas/my_new_record
   

4. Identify the correct audio device

   arecord -l
   

   I’m going to be using card 2, device 0 which is indicated on the second line:

   **** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
   card 2: CODEC [USB AUDIO  CODEC], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
       Subdevices: 0/1
       Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
   

5. Begin recording

   # Start a tmux session so the recording continues even
   # if the SSH connection gets disconnected
   tmux;
   
   sudo arecord --device "hw:2,0" -vv --vumeter=stereo -c 2 -f "S16_LE" -r 44100 raw_audio.wav;
   

   Explanation:

   • --device "hw:2,0" This means “card 2, device 0” that we found in step 4
   • -vv Double verbosity. Activates the VU meter
   • --vumeter=stereo Shows two channels in the VU meter
   • -c 2 Record two channels
   • -f "S16_LE" Record in Signed 16-bit little endian. I picked this simply becuase it matched the Audacity default that I was previously using
   • -r 44100 record in 44.1 kHz. Again, picked because it matched the Audacity default

6. Finish recording by pressing ctrl-c on the arecord command

Future work:

• Detect the end of the record / the record getting stuck and send a Pushover notification
• I thought about automaticallyrecording when the Pi detects a record playing but I decided that it would be too confusing to have to deal with unlabeled files