OT: MP3 Turntables

[znfdl]

A little background: I still own about 500 vinyl disks which play music. Remember the ones that used a needle to play the music. I am spending a lot of time on my computrainer these days, so I thought why not get an MP3 turntable and convert the disks to digital format.

Question, do any of you own any MP3 turntables and if so, which ones and would you reccomend them for purchase?

Thanks.

[joelh]

My wife bought me the one that costco has for christmas last year. It is easy to play record on. Recording them to digital files is much tougher. You have to play the record to download it into the computer and then put in the track breaks and name the tracks. Once that is done, you can convert them to MP3 files. If you are really good, you can edit out pops and hiss noise. So far, I have only managed to do 2.

I get frustrated easily when working on a computer, so I may not be the best judge. It was nice to listen to my vinyl copy of Quadraphenia though.

[pmac]

I set out to do this shortly after the iPod first came out. While I can't recommend any particular piece of hardware to convert to digital (I used my old turntable and some software that I can't recall), I can say that I gave up after about 10 or 20 albums. It takes a lot of effort, especially the editing after you've got the initial digital files, and the results were always barely OK at best. The software may have improved so that spaces between tracks can be better distinguished from moments of silence within tracks, and maybe noise removal works better now. For me, I just gradually bought mp3 files of the albums I like the most.

[ALB]

I don't have a mp3 turntable, but I have a regular turntable and ~2000 records. In my experience, digitizing records is a major pain -- for the reasons that joelh describes, and more.

It's much easier to just get the music you already own in digital form -- find a friend with the cd and rip it, or check it out of the library and rip it (you might be surprised at the breadth of cds in a good public library's collection), or find it shared online. I don't have a problem doing this for music that I've already paid for on vinyl... but your comfort zone may vary.

[Ahneida Ride]

Vinyl is final ....

NOTHING sounds as good as a good quality Vinyl recording.

and Steel is Real too !!!!!!

[znfdl]

Vinyl is final ....

NOTHING sounds as good as a good quality Vinyl recording.

and Steel is Real too !!!!!!

AR: I agree that Vinyl is final, however, I can be on my trainer for 5-6 hours and need to have a long play list.

[acorn_user]

I'd recommend buying a good audio sound card. Then hook up the tape out from your amplifier to the computer and use whatever software. I have used Audacity for a similar task (with tapes). Audacity is cheap and reasonably easy to use. You probably don't want a high-end computer gaming card, because they are for whizz-bang 5.1 and you are looking for the best possible two channel sound (unless you have some crazy 4 quadrasonic lps).

I'd buy an M-Audio 2496 or something from Digital Audio Labs. Probably the former, because it's cheaper.

[djg]

I bought an inexpensive one at Costco (ION?) and returned it, unhappy, after a short trial run. I found the process to be cumbersome and I also felt that the turntable just kind of scked as a turntable -- I'm not talking about fine points of audio excellence here, but problems in basic tracking, etc., that budget tables from dual and thorens, etc. never used to have.