Sweet Vinyl Sugarcube - I Want It!!!


At the NY Audio Show this past weekend, I got to see and hear the demo of the Sweet Vinyl Sugarcube.  This PC-based stand alone unit is amazing.  Here is what it does:


1.  De-clicks vinyl - and does so completely transparently, and is user-adjustable (more or less filtering of clicks and pops). 

2.  Digitizes vinyl - MP3 through 24/192 resolution.

3.  Locates metadata for LPs being played/digitized, including cover art

4.  Inserts track divisions based on the metadata (wow!).

5.  Compensates for non-RIAA recordings

6.  Plug in apps will do even more, like reducing groove noise.

It inserts in a line-level loop or between your phono preamp and preamp.  It has digital (S/PDIF and USB) outputs as well as analog outputs.


Projected retail is $2500, and they plan a kickstarter campaign soon.


If you spend time digitizing vinyl, this thing is nothing short of a miracle.  I want one so badly I can taste it.


(I am not associated with Sweet Vinyl in any way.)

bondmanp

Showing 2 responses by mapman

Bond, yes same thing.   Tracks that do not have clean silence between them are very hard for a computer program to do correctly in accordance with what is needed to then auto tag each track correctly.   A good example would be  progressive rock "suite" like say Suppers Ready by Genesis where the portions of the suite run into each other.    You need a really smart program and a very extensive and detailed set of metadata about the track for a computer to have a chance of getting it right with no manual interaction.   It can be done I'm sure but I'd be surprised to see it done accurately in many cases.    OR teh program might recognize what it does not know and prompt the user to help it.  That might still be somewhat fast and efficient if done right.    Someday soon I'd bet.
I’ll have to check that out. Currently, it takes me about an extra 15-20 minutes per album to delimit tracks and process using tic removal and normalization once played and digitized. I use free Audacity software for this part.

Then I autotag using free Picard software which usually requires some minimal manual interaction to recognize teh custom digital files I’ve created usually. If Picard doesn’t work due to some one-off recording or release then its manual tagging with DBpoweramp which adds more time. Picard has Shazam like music recognition capabilities that works pretty well overall with more popular commercial sourced digital releases but not as well in general with custom music files you digitize yourself from vinyl.

Overall, I use mostly free software that does a good job and I have a process down pretty well to get things done reasonably fast.

But any product that makes things mostly automated and saves me time has value and I am interested.

Have not found anything yet that can reliably auto delimit the tracks with a file digitized from a side of a record.  Audacity has some things that try but its usually faster for me to just go in and delimit in Audacity manually .