Rips from vinyl - Help

Hello, I’ve been slowly selling my records on Discogs and making fairly crappy rips of them before I do. Anyone any decent pointers?
I’ve a Traktor Z2 which I believe the phono stage is rubbish on.
I’ve also got an old Vestax VMC-004FXu.
How do you do it?
And what do you do after to make it lush for playing out?
Cheers

I very rarely rip vinyl these days. Sounds as your set up is better than mine anyway. Used to do it from the Technics turntable to a Numark mixer with just basic Audacity. Now got a Reloop RMX44 with a USB connection to the computer. Used to save them as WAV files but now mp3 on the highest setting. I’m old now and my hearing is not so good, so I can’t really tell if the quality is good enough. Had no complaints from my listeners on Mixcloud & Internet radio stations.

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1st I clean the record with a 50/50 mix of isopropyl and deionised water.
then using a hi-fi cart (not a dj cart )record using a little bear pre-amp that feeds the analog inputs of a Audient interface.once edited I save as flac

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+1 for pre-cleaning prior to ripping…
if you have many vinyls to rip either in one session, or over time, then its worth investing in a decent tool to help. Its worth speaking to Warwick at Vinyl People - Vinylpeople.co.uk - he’s got a cleaning spool/matt for 7"s > 12"s that makes things MUCH easier en masse.

Im not gonna comment on gear to capture.

But post audio capture it may be worth doing some audio jiggery-pokery to ensure the levels standup to digitally mastered versions - possibly DJ’d either side of your capture. And yes, I know that’s why Gain exists on your mixer, but nonetheless… sometimes normalization can help.

So for those who can’t Master music yourself then there are a few audio apps that might help - WARNING: tread carefully here though, you don’t want to crush the sound or inadvertently amp up the crackles/pops…

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