High-quality transfer to CD
from vinyl, 78 or tape

MP3-CDs

NOTICE TO CUSTOMERS

Record Restorations is no longer accepting new orders.
Apologies to customers old, new and prospective.
If you have an order outstanding you may be assured that it will be completed
and you will hear from me soon.
The service information on this site is no longer valid
and the site will be updated, when time permits, to reflect this.

Iain Carr

The CD transfer services described on other pages assume that finished CDs will be the normal audio type playable in a conventional CD player. As an alternative, though, you can request MP3s, which may be delivered via email or on MP3-CDs. These are not ordinary CDs, but contain the music in the compressed MP3 format. Most conventional CD players cannot play this type of disc, though a number of recent machines can. You should only request MP3-CDs if you know your CD player is specifically designed to handle them.

If you haven't seen the main digital transfer services described on other pages, follow these links: vinyl, tapes, 78rpm.

Of course, you can play MP3s on your computer. To hear them at their best, I would recommend connecting your computer's sound output to a good-quality amplifier-and-speakers combination. Or you can copy the files to a personal MP3 player such as Apple's iPod.

The advantages of the MP3 format are now fairly well known. They take up much less disc space than conventional audio files, yet can deliver the music at around the same quality, depending on how much compression is used. This means that a CD may be able to hold perhaps eight or more times as much music without noticeable degradation of sound. If a higher compression ratio is used to encode the MP3 files, the sound quality goes down, but more files may be fitted on the disc.

I will normally make MP3s encoded at 128kbits/sec. This setting is widely recognised as approximating CD quality, and most likely to be supported by your MP3-CD player. The files are arranged into directory folders, each folder being the equivalent of one "album". A single LP or tape may be divided into more than one folder, if appropriate; in the same way, more than one LP or tape may be placed in one folder. If you wish your MP3-CDs to be designed differently, or encoded at a different bitrate, I can probably accommodate your requirements. You should make sure that whatever you request is supported by your playing equipment.

MP3 tags
MP3 files contain space for optional text details of the recording. Many MP3 players can display these details while playing back the music. I will normally fill in the details Title, Artist and Album tags for your MP3 files instead of providing a CD case insert, which is at any rate usually inappropriate for a disc containing perhaps hundreds of music titles. If the details include a composer, I would add his or her name to the Album tag - for example "Bartok: String Quartet no. 1". Individual movements would go into the Title tag like this: "01 Lento", "02 Allegretto" and so on, so that they play in the correct order. Pop and rock songs are more straightforward as their details correspond well with these tags.

If you need more tags populated, or done differently to the ways described in the previous paragraph, your requirements should be described at the time of ordering.