X-OOM, a division of the German company BHV Software, has just launched this application which lets you transfer all those old tunes you have languishing around on vinyl or cassette onto your hard disk. The program comes with an adapter that allows you to plug the standard phono leads from your stereo into the line-in of your sound card. You can plug the amp in, or the record player in directly if you prefer (pre-amplifier emulation is provided).

The biggest problem with an analogue source like an old record is that it's likely to crackle and pop more than your average box of Rice Krispies. The idea of Music Clean 4 is that once your music is recorded onto the hard drive, the sound can then be tidied up using a range of tools.

Importing music into the program is simple: once your source is plugged in, you can perform a test run to set the input levels so they're high enough without being saturated. Then it's just a case of playing the tune(s), hitting Record, and then Stop when you're done. The program then moves on to the second stage of the process, the cleaning wizard.

Here the recording is presented in graph form, which clearly shows the location of obvious spikes of distortion. There are four filters that can be applied to the recording: a de-clicker (removes louder pops and clicks), a de-crackler (which removes the bane of vinyl, crackle), a de-noiser (smoothes over any static noise or hiss) and a de-clipper (fixes tracks that have been clipped because the recording level was set too high).

Each of these can be adjusted on a sliding scale of 0-100 percent and the effects are applied in real-time, so you can experiment with various settings as you listen to the playback. The end results of this cleaning process are reasonably impressive. The filters do a decent job of removing much of the noise, although we did find our recordings were a touch muffled when working with vinyl. However, cassettes didn't suffer from any dampening of the sound, so we don't blame the program here as our fairly old record player was probably at fault in some way.

Should you wish to tweak the recording in more detail, manual settings are provided; so, for example, the parameters used by the de-clicker can be adjusted. There are also miscellaneous filters to play around with, which can be used to add echo, reverb, fades and other effects. When you're all done, Music Clean offers you the choice of burning the results straight to a CD or exporting to a file.

Verdict
For £25 all-in, including the adapter you'll need to hook your stereo up to your sound card - or even plug your record player in directly - this is a solid package that does a decent job of digitising your old music collection.

Company: X-oom

Contact: +49 02131 76501

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