Review: Magix Rescue Your Vinyl & Tapes V2
Iain Laskey gets his record collection back from the graveyard
| Product | Rescue Your Vinyl & Tapes V2 |
|---|---|
| Company | Magix |
| Web | www.magix.com/UK |
| Price | £49.99 |
| We like | Complete bundle, great results, hugely flexible - easy or advanced modes. |
| We don't like | MP3 support needs beefing up. |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements | Windows XP/Vista/7 operating system |
I love my records. I have hundreds of them. I am vinyl obsessed. There, that's got that bit out of the way. Unfortunately, my current amp has no phono input so my trusty Ariston Q-Deck sits forlornly on a shelf and the poor records are stuffed away in sundry cupboards slowly being bashed into submission by everything else stuffed in there.
I've tried to copy a few to MP3 format before but it was a bit tortuous and to be honest, the rougher ones might sound OK on a proper HiFi but through an iPod's headphones, the crackles and pops lose their cute value rapidly. As a result, when Magix offered the new version of their vinyl and tape copying kit for review, I jumped at it.
Nice Bundle
Rescue Your Vinyl & Tapes comes bundled with a phono pre-amp and various leads and connectors. This allows you to connect your turntable and/or tape decks directly to your PC. The pre-amp is naturally for the turntable only, cassette decks and reel-to reel machines just use the leads. If you already have a way to connect your peripherals, you can buy the software part of the package seperately as Audio Cleaning Lab 16 Deluxe. The package also includes a small printed manual to get you started and an excellent and very detailed PDF based manual for further explorations. To celebrate their 15th anniversary, Magix also bundle PC Check & Tune 2010 although we didn't test that though.
Recording your Treasured Music
We mainly tested with vinyl. The process is broken down into four stages. Get the audio in, clean it up, remaster it, output it. You can save your work at any point so if you do something really bad, or need to spend more time on it, you can go back to exactly where you were which was very useful.
On the input side, you can either set levels manually or via an automated wizard but make sure you choose a loud passage on your record to avoid the levels being too high. Vinyl often has a wide dynamic range and the difference between loud and quiet passages can be unexpected. Once done, you play the record and hit record in the software. At the end of side 1, press pause, turn over the record and finish the process with side 2.
The system tries to spot where one track stops and another starts but you can manually add/remove/move these markers as desired. There are also basic editing facilities at this stage which we found a bit hit and miss until we found the best way to do it which seemed to be to split the track either side of the bit you want removed then remove the newly created 'track'. You can zoom in and out very easily to help pinpoint a place in a recording and keyboard shortcuts such as space bar to stop/start playback help immensley.
As well as vinyl, you can get the audio from tapes, CDs or other existing audio files in a variety of formats.
Next up is the cleaning stage. A wizard can automate this for beginners and does a fair job of setting the right amount and type of processing. Using this, we found the pops/crackles and sometimes hiss from the vinyl was pretty much completely removed. You can opt to manually set any of the various tools yourself which brings up a rather more complex interface for each one designed to mimic the rack based processors found in studios.
Whilst the cleaning tools were extremely powerful, they did tend to take the shine off many tracks that has bad surface noise removed so the next stage, mastering is very important. Again, there are multiple tools available which you can use in easy mode or full bells and whistles mode. These can help brighten up the recording, improve the dynamic range, widen the stereo soundstage and more. You can even run it through a compressor if you favour that 'in your face' all sounds at maximum sound favoured by many CD mastering houses.
Finally, you have the choice of writing out the resulting tracks to CD, MP3, other audio formats or DVD Audio. Writing to CD or DVD was fine but the MP3 side needs a lot of work as in its current form it falls down badly. Yes, it produces good sounding MP3s with a good choice of bit rates and other options but we did find the choices on naming them was very limited. We'd have liked a screen that let you give them unique names on a track by track basis rather than my_album_01, my_album_02 etc. There's also no way to set up the MP3 tags for recording the artist, genre, year, album title etc. The result was we had to manually rename each track in Windows and then manually set each track's tags. A very slow and error prone process, especially if you're not that familiar with the source as the initial track naming did seem a bit random as to whether it assigned the track orders from first to last or vice versa. You could use a third party tool to help with the tagging but given how good everything else is with Rescue Your Vinyl and Tapes, this is a real weakness that shouldn't be there.
Other options the system supports include timestretching and resampling. You can even play a 78rpm record at 45 or 33rpm and then have the system adjust the recording to make it sound as if it had beeen played at 78rpm. There's a wealth of options, features and adjustments that we don't have space to cover here. Suffice to say, this is a flexible piece of software that manages to be easy to use and powerful at the same time.
Sound Quality
The first thing we realised when starting this review was that our normal PC speakers were woefully inadequate for listening to the tracks as we worked on them so we had to connect the PC up to an amp and HiFi speakers. Once done, we were very impressed. The power of the cleaning up tools is leagues ahead of what was possible only a few years ago. Modern PCs allow you to adjust settings and listen to the results in realtime making it easy to get the best out your music. The wizards generally do a perfectly adequate job but for some records we did opt for more manual adjustment to really get good sounding tracks out of the process. Magix claim the sound processing is ProAudio spec and we had no reason to disbelieve them.
The end result when listened to on our test HiFi was very impressive indeed. The music sounded great, the cracks, pops and sundry other vinyl artifacts were all but elliminated and the mastering tools allowed the tracks to be given some extra sparkle. In many ways, playing with them reminded us of DFX Audio which we recently reviewed - they music sounded more involving, more interesting than the source material but without sounding false, which is commendable.
It's worth noting that we used a pretty standard PC sound card for our tests. Add in a 24bit audiophile or studio grade sound card and with the quality of the software processing we experienced, we can easily imagine even better results being possible.
Conclusion
We think that for £50 (£42 at Amazon) you can't go wrong. We wouldn't suggest that the results from this package are going to worry people who listen to a Linn Sondek through Naim amps and Kef speakers but we'd be hard pushed to spot a difference between the resulting MP3s and the original vinyl when played via a £1800 Yamaha home cinema amp and the same Ariston deck. With careful tweaking, the results were often better to our ears. We'd have liked improved support for MP3 file naming and tagging but if you just want to output to CD or DVD then we'd have given this 10/10. As it stands, it easily makes 9/10 and comes highly recommended for dragging your vinyl and tapes into the 21st century.
