I use Audacity on my pc and the MIC in from my amp. It's very easy and completely free. Audacity allows you to save as WAV or mp3 with variable bit rate. It also has some editing effects on it which can make for interesting results in down time.

It could also be used to record any Audio that is playing on your pc but clearly if you copy any copywrited material you should hand yorself in to the correct authority and so forth.

...using Audio Hijack Pro. It's a bit of a faff but it does work. I can't imagine what it's like doing this on a large scale.

is what I use, also a bit of a faff. Got it at christmas, so far I've half done about a dozen and finished (i.e. split into tracks and converted to mp3) half that. Nice to hear Boat to Bolivia again though.

I was quite happy with the quality until I made the mistake of giving my converted Great Gig in the Sky to an audiophile, who found it nostalgic but nowhere near CD quality. But I've no idea how much I could have improved it by tweaking, with a bit more time/knowledge.

Not having a soundcard I use the griffin I-mic usb soundcard and audacity. I had a similar problem and had to use the head phone socket. It's fine for burning singles lp's are ok but it takes a while.
As to sound quality well that's mp3's for you. You could try playing them back on one of the those ipod base sets which use fancy tricky to try to put back all the information lost in ripping them in the first place.
One thing I've just thought of is on my amp you can select "direct or tone" on the input selection you can try playing with this to boost bass etc. You can also do this on audacity.

I'm assuming you're saving the files on your computer as .wav files rather than .mp3 files.

If so, could it be that you're converting them to .mp3 at too low a bitrate?

I connect my headphone socket on the amp to the line in on my soundcard and also use Audacity. I think the default on Audacity is to record in mono so this needs to be changed.

Of course you can't improve on the quality of the originals.

easy to record then use the volume boost thing from the effects menu. convert .wav to mp3 on Switch and you're good to go...

This little beauty cost me around a ton, and takes a line level input from my Rega (or via my amp if I can't be bothered to unplug stuff) and pipes it into the PC over a USB2 line. It has decent gold-plated phono sockets for input, and adjustable input levels and capacity settings. There is a little yellow light to show there's a signal on the line, and a little red light to show if the signal's getting clipped because you haven't got things adjusted correctly.

I can use any audio software to capture the music; the gizmo just appears as an audio source to Windows. I'm not sure if I could get it working on my Linux box, as I can't be bothered to worry about that option.

For wav capture I use the above mentioned Audacity most of the time, but Wavelab will do just as well.

The gizmo ships with some Terratec audio-cleaning software, but quite honestly it isn't up to what can be achieved with Wavelab, or even with Audacity.

Highly recommended.

I'd copy the vinyl into the computer as WAV files (one per side of the vinyl), split them into tracks however you want and burn CDs of them. Then re-import the CDs as MP3s for listening on your portable media player.

It means you still have an uncompressed version if/when the next file format comes along.

For cleaning up vinyl audio you might want to look at Soundsoap (which is about £100 and only runs on Mac). I use iZotope RX which runs on Windows or Mac but is a bit more expensive (more like £180), but I can justify that because I use it for work.

I've just downloaded Audacity so I'm going to try this as an alternative to LP Ripper/LP Recorder which come with the Inport Deluxe (both free anyway). I have heard some results of USB Turntables and Audacity from an online review and despite the fact the reviewer was bemoaning the quality I actually thought it was better than my efforts!

I know I'll never match the originals but I hadn't listened to much vinyl recently and when I was playing it again I was reminded by how good it sounds. That's why I was a little disappointed by the results.

Thanks for everyone's input so far anyway. I may decide to go for the USB turntable but as I'd spent about £40 on the hardware I'm currently using I was a bit reluctant if I'd get the same results.

I'll keep you posted on how I get on. Thanks again...

I've just hit a rich seam of 1992 hardcore and am presently converting 'Way In My Brain' by SL2 from a vinyl 12-inch that hasn't been played since about 1993. I know this because it still had tea leaves on it from when it was stored in a tea crate.

Haven't got much to add to what's above except that selecting an MP3 bitrate of 320kbps under Audacity seems to get a far better approximation of the vinyl sound than 128/192. Also it's nice to add a little "Fade In/Out" at the beginning/end so you don't get a sudden, jarring blast of surface noise before the track starts.

.

...is I have my turntable plugged into the hifi amp, then a lead from the amp's Tape Out to my mixer which boosts the signal a bit to the sound card inputs. I record into Wavelab, which I then use it for removing noise (in Wavelab it's the Denoiser and Declicker plugins) and if I particularly like the album and there are big scratches I'll remove them manually with the pen tool. Then I use a mastering programme called Ozone 3 and run the "CD Master" preset over it - this basically adds a bit of top end and makes it a bit louder. THEN I add markers and either burn it to CD (usually) or maybe save certain tracks as MP3s. I get it into iTunes in the usual way. Spookily, quite often iTunes knows what it is!

There is a Wavelab Lite available which is pretty well spec'd.

I've also used Steinberg Clean which is quite good and simple, but I find Wavelab does everything I need, mind you I use it for a lot more than cutting vinyl onto CD!

I recently transferred a very good condition LP of John Martyn Live at Leeds and it sounded fantastic on CD. Using Tape Out means I can record anything which is plugged into the hifi amp, so my precious collection of concerts, radio recordings etc on cassette are slowly being digitised too.

Thomann have some good deals on USB recording stuff:

http://www.thomann.de/gb/search_dir.html?sw=usb+turntable&x=0&y=0

For those who don't know them they are a top notch site of music technology of all types.

Just got this from e-bay for $55.00 Canadian and it is superb I have not been using the clean up side of it yet as I actually enjoy the odd crackle and hiss. So far the 12 inch singles like Carly Simon's "Why" and Coati Mundi's "Me No Popeye" sound absolutely amazing. It is very simple to usu and just automatically sends the recordings to I-Tunes library. David is right though the real joy is in the listening while recording its like making those mix tapes all over again.

The good people at TEAC have a box called TG350.
It's exactly what a non-techhead like me needs.

To record vinyl to cd all ytou have to do is follow these steps.

1/ Put the needle on.
2/ Push pause.
3/ Push play.
4/ Listen to the song.
5/ Push pause again when the song is complete.
6/ Put another record on and start all over again.

Could hardly be more simple.

The sound quality varies depending on the type of music.
To my ears bass sounds are actually better than cd standard. Deeper and richer, bands sound like they are playing in your living room. It has occured to me that might just be the scraping of the needle creating that illusion.

Treble sounds however are sometimes terrible its too shrill and too painful. "My ears, my ears!"

The device doesn't have any recording levels so you can't adjust it.

You can make it softer or louder but that's it. I will eventually re-do all the particularly bad ones at a lower level.

Also when recording an entire album its annoying that the system takes so long to pause properly. You have to pick up the needle and restart the record to get the beginning of the next song. The easier alternative is to record each side in one big gulp.

I would not recommend it to a serious audiophile (the lack of bass/treble controls is a serious mistake)but for anyone else its a dream to use. It cost me $400 Australian and was worth every penny. They cost mid $200's in the USA. They must be available somewhere in the UK.

Best to lose the HiFi amp from the process. If you already have a turntable you need a turntable amp either with or without a USB output. I use one with a phono output that I feed into a Creative USB sound card (which work fine on PCs and Macs). I save the results (one file per side) as 320 VBR LAME MP3 files which, as my hearing is never going to improve, will be good enough for me to take to my grave. I use Goldwave to do the capturing and the editing (I find it much easier to use than Audacity and it's just as free if you locate the appropriate registry hive and change a number).

Once I have the main files I chop off the crud at the start and end then create a cue points file that allows Goldwave to chop the file up into individual tracks, all appropriately named.

Goldwave also has an excellent "interpolation" tool that allows you to zoom in and remove clicks and pops without running everything through a "sledgehammer" filter - it's time consuming but worth it.

I did my first vinyl conversion at least 12 years ago and my method has changed very little since - apart from the fact that it's considerably quicker to edit a 32M file when you have 1G of RAM than it was on an old 486 with 16M and I used to do everything with wav files becuase that was really the only option.

I should also point out that there are several blogs that have pretty good quality ripped vinyl on them so that "You don't have to" Try googling for "Powerpop criminals" as a starting point.

All of which are mentioned here, ie. the headphone jack, usb turntable and the Teac I've got to agree that the Teac wins hands down for ease of use. I record a side at a time then clean up, tweak and split tracks with Magix Audio Cleaner before saving to Wave files then ripping to mp3 for my ipod.

A word of warning regarding the Teac however in that it will only record to Audio CDR's not to your standard CDR's you use in your PC, something to do with copyright laws, these can be a pain in the arse to get hold of on the high street but are usually availale on ebay.

I got a ION USB record player jobbie for Christmas and it was a piece of the proverbial to set up and run with my iMac.

The only problems I have is the update to the Audacity software I downloaded which I can't seem to get working (I've gone back to the old version and am not fiddling with it again!) and the fact that if I just want to simply listen to a platter, I have to set the computer recording or no sound comes out of the Mac.

I leave all the skips and crackles in for nostalgic purposes. Except for my Slade in Flame L.P, which after too many years living under luggage and boxes of Christmas decorations in my parents' attic is alas too warped and scratched to appreciate the subtleties of The Holder's foghorn.