Vinyl to CD

[willowman]

I want to transfer my (large) vinyl record collection to CD.
Can anyone give me an idea of how many megabytes an average vinyl LP will take up on a disc?
I know it will vary according to what is on the LP, but a rough idea would help me work out how many discs I'll need.
Thanks guys.

[Milvus]

I did the same a while ago. As an example Eric Clapton's Another ticket LP, after converting and cleaning takes up 36 MB for its 9 tracks, Ry Cooder's Boomer's Story, 10 tracks, 40MB

[rojash]

Do you mean Audio CD or in a compressed format (such as mp3)?
A 700mb CD will hold 80 minutes of audio.

If you intend to convert to mp3, then many factors come into play:
You can choose a higher compression rate for smaller files and lower quality or vice versa.
It's possible to convert at a constant bitrate or a variable bitrate. At a constant bitrate you can
Some tunes are inherently more compressible than others, so the actual musical content will also make a difference.
When recording at a constant bitrate, the formula is
Minutes per disc = <disc size> / ((<bitrate> / 8) * 60)

[Milvus]

I converted to AAC Audio to hold them in iTunes

[tamborine]

I work on average 3mins per song x 20 on a CD.

[willowman]

Thanks for your answers, but I'm still confused.
Rojash - a very comprehensive answer but way above my head; I haven't got a clue what you're on about, sorry.
But.....rojash says 700mb = 80 mins of music, which is roughly, and I mean roughly, 4 old LPs
Milvus says an old Ry Cooder LP takes up 40 mb, therefore you could fit roughly 17 of these into 700mb.
These two statistics do not match up, or am I missing something.

To elaborate on my question (apologies, I should have done it first), I was given an ION USB turntable for Christmas to convert all my LPs. I would like to put them onto CDs, or my MP3 player. I may also back them up onto an external hard drive. They are important, stretching back to the 1960's.
Does this make a difference to your answer?

[rojash]

I'll try again :-)

If you go to the shops and buy a pre-recorded CD, it contains digital audio. Because the digital audio is uncompressed, there is a direct correlation between the length of the song (regardless of content) and the amount of storage required. This is why when you buy a blank CD you will see it labelled with both a size (e.g. 700MB) and a time (80 Min). The original CDs were 650 MB or 72 Min.

You didn't make it clear in your original question whether you were intending to convert you LPs to digital audio, as described above, or MP3. You've now said that you also want to put the music on your MP3 player, so I guess that answers the question.

MP3 (and similar formats) use compression so that the storage required for a typical song is much less. However, all other things being equal, the amount of compression depends on the musical content, so there is no direct relationship between the length of the song and the amount of storage it will require. To make things worse, all other things are not equal: you can choose the type of compression, the amount of compression, etc.

The simplest form of compression uses a fixed bitrate, but more sophisticated forms vary the bitrate according to the musical content. Consequently, the only way to find out the size when compressed is to actually compress the song and then see how big it is!

[rojash]

As you are using an ION turntable, I'm guessing that you will also be using the Audacity software to perform the conversion. Audacity uses Lame to convert files to MP3, and I beleive it uses a fixed birate of 128Kbps. For this bitrate, I found this table on WikiAnswers:

"Use the following Rule of Thumb:

1 MB == 1 min of play (at 128 kbps)

Typical song length = 4 min

Number of songs 128 MB can hold,

128/4 = 32 songs

So,

128 MB == 32 songs

256 MB == 64 songs

512 MB == 128 songs

1 GB == 256 songs "

[willowman]

Thanks rojash, now I understand.
That's the simple language necessary for me.
Yes indeed, the software is Audacity. Sorry, should have given you all the information at first.
So it seems I will be able to get a lot of LPs onto one disc, ie all of one singers albums.
Great news, and thanks for being patient