Several years ago, I started digitizing my music collection, all CD's, tapes and records. For the most part it has been completed, but I ended up with a few which I was, for whatever the reason, unable to digitize. These were mostly vinyl albums which were just too scratchy to get a good sounding MP3. Of course the most difficult of these to find were the obscure ones which were never released on a CD and therefore virtually impossible to locate a decent source for.
YouTube to the rescue!
I was looking for some video related to motorcycles when I stumbled on several references to the Michael Parks TV series, Then Came Bronson on YouTube. One thing lead to another and I suddenly found a source for one of the more obscure of my vinyl albums, Closing The Gap by Michael Parks. Some devoted fan had posted the complete album, scratches and all, on YouTube.
But even though I could listen to the music while logged into YouTube, the problem remained of how to make a digital copy for my own personal collection. This was not really a problem at all for me as I've used used Audio HiJack Pro for a number of years. This wonderful program for Mac OS X, will basically capture any audio that the computer is capable of playing and save it to most any format you desire, including MP3's. So using this program I soon had a complete set of scratchy MP3 songs from the album on my desktop.
Since I previously did my entire vinyl album collection, I've been a registered user of ClickRepair for a number of years as well. Plus a new version had been released April 26th, so I used it to clean the captured MP3's. Unfortunately I had to first convert all the MP3's to AIFF files as ClickRepair does not work with MP3's, but using another in my stable of audio programs, Amadeus Pro, I quickly converted the files, cleaned them using ClickRepair and finally converted them back to MP3's using Amadeus Pro. BTW, the conversion part could have mostly been eliminated if I had told Audio HiJack Pro to save as AIFF in the first place, live and learn.
So now I have a mostly CD quality copy of this wonderful old album. Plus I got to relive a few memories of days gone by and see some footage from the old TV show I loved so much as a high school kid. All in all, a pretty good day!
