The overall goal of Burntable is to organize and maintain the world's largest digitized analog media archive. While the Internet Archive and Library of Congress have done a spectacular job preserving (and in many cases recovering) analog media, we're more interested in the vinyl in your life; out there in the wild! With that, we have an "archival" mentality here and prefer to stick to unprocessed, uncompressed/lossless audio. For newer releases this serves as a means to demonstrate flaws in new pressings, as well. Don't get us started on the four defective pressings of Adele's 30 we purchased from Target here in the US. To mask these flaws could deceive someone in our community looking to purchase this pressing. Hiding flaws would also let presses off the hook for not maintaining better quality control. It's easy to forget that vinyl (polyvinyl chloride) is plastic (and not a very recyclable one at that). Anything we can do to make sure that plastic doesn't end up in the trash is a good thing.
What you do with your captured vinyl files after you contribute them to our archive is your business. But when it comes to Burntable, please be mindful of the following:
Please capture in 96khz, 24 bit if you can. Do not clip the digital signal. Most audio interfaces will allow a significant amount of headroom if you're using a standard phono stage. Leave this headroom alone and let our post-processor handle it. It's very typical to see recording levels at below -15dBFS on your DAW's meter. This is fine.
Please only upload .flac files in 96khz or 48khz. Any other sample rate will be rejected by our drop processor.
Don't apply any dynamics processing. Even "peak leveling" must be done across the entire release. This is a very tedious process and is automated by our processor for you.
Don't remove pops and clicks. If you want to remove them, try an ultrasonic cleaner; or just perform destructive edits to files after you upload them to Burntable.
We don't know what the future will offer in post-processing so by contributing un-processed files we can experiment long into the future as post processing technology improves.
At this time, there are no automated "pop and click removal" plugins (or algorithms) that don't leave behind obvious (and destructive) artifacts. If you disagree, that is fine, but please keep post-processed files to yourself.
Finally, it's always a good idea to search before you upload. Contributing pressings that are awesome but missing from our library is a great place to start!