Vinyl to cd recorders

[stephenp1983]

I'm trying to help dad find a way to transfer his vinyl records and if possible some of his cassettes.  He is not technical at all, so any of the ones involving transfering to the computer first aren't going to work.  I'm leaning towards on the of teac models I've found on amazon, but wanted to know if anyone had experience with any of these and could recommend a particular brand:

http://tinyurl.com/ltshyb

[richms]

Those cheap turntables are pretty bad.

IMO the best way is to just find your stuff on torrent sites ripped from CD.

Otherwise find a friend who has a kid who thinks they are a bedroom DJ and has some technics 1200 or 1210s, steal it for a week, and get a proper cartridge for it and that's about the best you will get, for the preamp, most ok dj mixers will do just fine, then run that into the line in of your sound card.

Even the dj cartridges that will let you scratch on them are leaps above the junk that come on the plastic turntables with the USB audio device have in them. Just wind down the weight from what they have them set to for djing so you dont end up carving up the discs.

For the software side there are heaps of tutorials online about it. just avoid those flimsy junk turntables.

[dafelandry]

the best way is to just find your stuff on torrent sites ripped from CD.
just avoid those flimsy junk turntables.

definatly X2!!! Or do what I do and just stick to vinyl...... (love my records)

Actually the best way I have done it while not resorting to torrents (which i have done hense my 115 Gb of music on my pc) is use the best record player (or cassette deck) you have into a good sounding amp and use the headphone jack to the audio input jack on your pc (generally the red port).... sounds like a jerry rig but it works well

for free recording software i use: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
(for high end recording i use Protools but thats a diffrent story...)

if you use audacity make sure you watch you recording levels and dont have the audio clipping!!!

its simple once you get used to it plus saves you from buying a plastic POS turntable!! Oh and another thing i would recommend a laptop for easy portability!! (just make sure you dont have it plugged in while recording..it will add additonal noise)

Theres my 2 cents

[stephenp1983]

I've offered to look through torrents for him, but alot of the stuff he has is obscure southern gospel music he has on cassettes, which isn't likely to be out there   He still listens to the vinyl at the house, he just wanted to be able to take some of it with him to listen to in the car.

[drventure]

I've used a similar setup to rip a small pile of my albums, then I used Magix Audio Cleaning Lab to clean up the recordings. It's cheap but, at least to my ears, it works quite well, especially on older roughed up vinyl (my Dad used it on some albums he found in the attic from when I was a kid, to convert them to a CD for my daughter. Let me tell you, those albums were +NOT+ in good shape, when the cd sounds almost as good as an original CD recording, and my Dad's definitely not a recording engineer 

Finally, do all the recording/cleanup in uncompressed WAV format, and, once everything's sounding decent, I use LAME to convert to MP3. It's by far the best encoder I've heard.

[GadgetGeek]

and use the headphone jack to the audio input jack on your pc

Similar for me but I used the line-out on the amp to the line-in on the soundcard.

Its been a few years since I last did this.  At the time, I used CoolEdit96 (I think that was the name).  If I had to do it today, Audacity.

[dafelandry]

Cool Edit 96 is now reshelled and "updated" it is now known an Adobe Audition...  great peice of software!

[Mauzy]

I've been using this inexpensive table for a few months with no problems. It has the USB option on it, but I've only tried that once. Worked alright with the bundled software but I'm sure better can be done software wise. I mainly just listen to records through a receiver.

http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&productId=8198552921665361524