Recording vinyl to CD or a PC?

[mac]

Hello there, I was wondering if any of the more technically minded of you would know a good way of transferring vinyl to a CD or to my PC, Theres a basic sound recorder on my PC which I've tried but I'm not very happy with the results so far, and actually getting the sound to the PC is very fiddly. I find that I have to use cables with lots of adaptors etc. Surely there must be a simpler way?
Any suggestions?
Thanks
mac

[Guinness]

There is a way. Usuallly when you hook up your PC to your computer it comes through as a wave format and will play over anything else the computers has running... more or less it acts as an "analogue" sound.

I personally use a mixer from an old record player i had and put it through the midi part of my soundcard. If you dont have a soundcard im sure you will be able to do this with one of the usual 3 inputs on average motherboards these days.

Also as i am aware, Sinecurea hooked up his vinyl to the PC in order to get the benefit out of the boxset before the CD release of "Songs From The Deep Forest" as did I.

Whatever you choose to do, i hope this has been helpful! :wink:

[mac]

Thanks, that is very helpful and has made me think about it in ways that I hadnt thought of before. Ive downloaded some free sound recorder programmes off the web and hope to investigate them at the weekend.
Thanks again,
mac

[Guinness]

:wink:

[aarons]

Id love to get my boxser on to iPod but im not gonna shell out for a mixer to plug stuff in to.

Wait for a CD release i think!

[mac]

Yeah, me too! I was pricing a soundcard with phono inputs for my computer. Phew! Thats why I'm trying to do it DIY style!!!

[Stephen]

Folks, you should just need one lead, going from the record player to the computer, and a sound recording program. You should be able to just use the one that comes with window, but I would only recommend using the one with XP.
Mac users, I used AudioHijack, although I'm sure you'll be able to get GarageBand to record it perfectly well.

I used this lead:
http://www.cablesdirect.com/prodimages/CC399-05_LR.jpg

to connect the LP player to the MacBook.
You just need to play about a bit with the levels to make sure that the quiet bits are fine and the loud bits are, well loud, but not distorted.
Just start the song playing and press record on the PC! I didn't bother doing any normalisation or any of that jive afterwards, mainly just due to my lack of knowledge of the right software available for Macs.

Hope this helps.

Steve.

[mac]

Thanks for all the help, Ive finally cracked it and am happy with the results. I downloaded a free program called Golden Records which I find very user friendly ( even for me! ) After a few attempts and a bit of trial and error with levels etc... its working very well.
Its great to be able to listen to Songs from the deep forest in the car at last!
Thanks again

[arginite]

Mac users who want to do this (that are running older macs that is) will need a USB device for example a Griffin iMic in order to run a stereo input to your mac. Not all macs support audio in hence Griffin produced yet another little gadget to solve this problem. Basically you just use the cables Steve already mentioned and plug them into the input port of the iMic. Then you plug the iMic into a usb port on the mac and off you go. Use something like Audacity, or SoundStudio to record the sound and then fix it up using whatever audio software you are happiest with.