Making CDs out of records

[Judy G. Russell]

Oh man... For years I've been waiting to get my computer geek nephew up here for a few days so he could set up a system for converting my LPs to CDs. The last time I looked into it, it was all just so complex that I threw up my hands and walked away from it.

So Ian is up here (attending bartending school, and the brat hasn't brought home one single homework assignment!) and tonight he sat down to figure out what was needed and to set up the system.

And it is soooooooooo easy.

It took him about, oh, two minutes. Even I could have done it in two minutes. One cable to connect the output of the turntable to the input of the sound card. And (get this) one $29 piece of software called Pyro 5 from Cakewalk. That's all you need. Then you open the program, click on Make CDs of your cassettes and LPs, give the file you're going to record to a name, then start the record playing and click on Start Recording. When you're done, you locate the places where one song ends and another begins and mark 'em, then tell the program to split 'em out as separate files. You can set it up to clean up the snaps and crackles as you record or you can clear 'em out later.

You can save 'em as WAV files, or as MP3 files. If you save 'em as WAV, you can bring 'em into Itunes and convert 'em to the format for your IPOD.

Oh man... this is fun... Stuff I haven't listened to in about a kazillion years is going onto my IPOD tonight...