I’ve been ripping a lot of stuff from vinyl to FLAC recently. Here’s how I do it.
I have an Alesis I/O 2, which works well and seems fairly decent quality.
First, most important, step, is to stop trying to use Audacity. It’s incredibly broken and unreliable. Go get ocenaudio instead. It’s fairly new, but it works reliably.
After monitoring your levels, record the whole thing into ocenaudio.
First trim any obviously loud clicks such as when landing the needle. ocenaudio doesn’t seem to have a “draw sample” function yet, the only thing I miss from Audacity, but deleting just a few samples is usually fine.
Normalise everything.
Then select a whole track using Shift-arrows (and Control to go faster).
Press Control-K to convert it into a region, and name it if you like.
You’ll see references to using zero-crossing finders to split tracks.
This is always a bad idea - it’s simply not reliable enough, especially
with an old crackly record, isopropyl’d or not.
Zoom all the way out again, make sure the number of tracks is right.
Then File->Export Audio From Regions, making sure that the “separate files” checkbox is set.
Now it’s tagging time: run “kid3 yourdirwithflacs”. First import from discogs, presuming it has the release (it usually will) File->Import From Discogs. Then click ‘Tag 2’ in the Format Up part, along with the format you need. Save all those, then use Tools->Rename Directory to rename the containing directory. You’re done.