How do you digitalize your music?

[upekah]

Thanks for the nice answers so far!
I actually want to play the trax out later which I got on Vinyl

I thought there is a big mystery in digitalizing tracks proper but that doesn't seem to be at all

[cecil]

All of this, except Normalizing actually just raises the overall volume/gain on quiet recordings to a certain point...so it's actually not harmful, it's desired.
Different than compression.
Just make sure you normalize only to 100%, not above.

IMO applying normalization introduces a type of distortion. For me, it's a digital compromise and I tend to make the 'digital representation' 'au naturel' (pure) as possible. If you get the gain right, you don't need normalisation. Probably a matter of taste ;-)

Oh, and also clean the sh¡t out of your records before recording.

so true!

[korgborglar]

Normalizing can introduce some (very) small distortion due to quantization error when it rescales the audio file, especially if your audio prog processes in 32 bits, then you output a 16 bit file. BUT if you dither, that distortion gets eliminated and instead you bring up the noise floor by a very small margin, which is less noticeable.

That said, proper gain staging is the most important step.

[revy]

The problem though is if you plan on using traktor or ableton to beatmatch for you it will have problems because of the turntables wow and flutter

especially if you use traktor scratch pro or serato and then you have the recordings wow and flutter plus the control records, it will be harder to keep everything in sync

This I don't understand; I don't have that issue whatsoever with my recordings, and I record using a 1200 with pitch (typically) locked at zero.
Using a belt-drive turntable or any turntable with bad/wobbly pitch will increase the likelihood of these problems though....

i digitized most of my vinyl a few years ago, many of my records were warped from playing outdoors, which can mess with your bpm... but if mixing with ableton you can just set a few extra warp points and it shouldnt be too hard to deal with. or just nudge the first cue if you hear it getting off track during a mix