Update, January 1, 2024: I haven't made any changes since Halloween 2021. I'd started modifying this script to suit my needs, and I think it came close. I was in the process of ripping my late father-in-law's record collection, when, on December 21, 2022, my house was destroyed by a fire. The record collection, turntable, and computer I was using, were all destroyed. As a result, since I no longer have a record collection or turntable, I'm definitely done with this. A big thank you to Scott C for his code and his patience.
This is a branch of Scott C.'s excellent vinyl ripper utility. It did about 99% of what I wanted in a helper app, and works great for several others. However, for my own wants and needs, I wanted to have the script attempt to estimate the beginning and end of the tracks, instead of just the beginning, and used PyDub to add silence detection to the script. I also tend to trim the silence from the beginning and end of recordings manually, so I removed the feature to estimate the seconds leading into the first track, and the length of the gap.
What Pydub adds to the process is a lengthy scan for silence greater than a second long, less than -16dB. It then compares the beginning and end of each silence gap to the estimated track lengths, and provided one is found that's less than 30 seconds distant from the estimated track length, replaces the estimated time with the one discovered by Pydub. For Pydub to work, you need a 64-bit build of Python, enough available memory to load the entire clip into memory, and patience. I suggest getting a cup of tea while you wait. Once it's done scanning, it works much like the original script.
I'm also removing the PDF from this fork; while it's an excellent and thorough manual, because I'm changing the functionality enough that it warranted a rewrite, rather than get Scott C.'s permission to edit his original document, I'm going to attempt to write some abridged instructions in a Free format like Markdown.
This fork is a work in progress; feel free to consult ScottC's repo for the original stable script.
original text follows
VinylRipperHelper, or VRH is a Python utility for people who use the free software Audacity application to “rip” vinyl LP records and tapes to digital format. To use VRH in its initial version, one first needs to make a recording of an album that he/she would like to rip. Then one needs to download the tracklist page for the album being ripped from the Discogs.com website.
Then run VRH, and it will 1) extract the track list and times, and use them to create the labels that are needed to identify all of the songs on the recording. VRH will also 2) Create a “tags” template file to use with the Audacity metadata editor. This file provides all of the XML tags for the album including the title, artist, genre, year, plus any other tags that were listed for the album in the discogs.com tracklist page.
Combined together, these two files substantially reduce the amount of time-consuming data entry required to perform the process for exporting multiple tracks to individual song files with Audacity.
VinylRipperHelper is GNU Public License v3 (GPLv3) licensed software, please contribute if you have ideas for bug fixes or improvements. VRH is developed and maintained by Scott Chilcote, scottch1 @ github.com