Vinyl to computer

[wan2no]

How do you take songs off a vinyl record and put them onto the pc?

What equipment is needed?

[piano632]

1. A turntable with phono cartridge.
2. A phono amplifier.
3. A sound card with RCA audio inputs.

Avoid using cheap equipment. Much better sound can be had if you spend a fair amount of money on the equipment.

[Alex_ander]

Buy a 24-bit soundcard like Audigy 2 or better. Use multiple sample rates (88.2, 176.4kHz for audio CD) @ 24 bit for quality recordings, then filter out frequencies higher than 20khz and downsample to 44.1/16bit for audio CD.

[akrako1]

You could simply use the 'line-in' jack on your soundcard or mobo. Internal audio has a worse signal-to-noise ratio, but if that's all you have, then that's all you have. If that's the case, use a cable with 2 rca's on one side, and a headphone jack on the other. Run it from an OUTPUT on your receiver to the 'line-in' on the computer. Use a wav recorder such as GoldWave, Cool Edit, or various freeware utilities. I'd suggest recording a whole side of the record at a time, and then breaking it up into tracks after it's recorded (you'll see the amplitude of the wave drop to zero inbetween tracks). Save the pieces as individual wav files, and burn. You might also want to look into 'crackle' or 'pop' eliminators, which can clean up the noisy vinyl surface (without any real signal degredation that can happen with noise/hiss/static removers).

[Bodyslide]

This should do the trick...

http://www.amazon.com/Ion-iTTUSB-Turntable-USB-Record/dp/B000BUEMOO