I have (finally) decided to transfer all my old 7" singles on to CD.Is this possible? If so, what do i need?

Question

Obviously if this "illegal" (yeah,right) you can not advise me. If you can
help, what equipment do i need (please remember i am a technophobe) and how much will it all cost?

Cheers.

Answer 1

Record deck (do you still have it - will it play at 45rpm - are the cartridge & stylus in good order)
amplifier with headphone socket
connecting lead from headphone jack to small (line in) jack on soundcard.
PC with soundcard or sound on motherboard - any PC that can play music...
Audacity (free downladable software) to record
Lots of time...
Hard disk space
a CDwriter
media CD±R or CD±RW - these will need to be compatible with whatever you will be playing them on
Nero or Roxio - burning software (to copy the files to CD). There are probably free alternatives...

You may be able to record with Nero/Roxio - haven't tried. Audacity was free and it works for me - easy to clean up scratches... just takes forever with my vinyl LPs

MP3 format reduces the size of the recordied file, with no loss of quality at 4x (at 44x everyone sounds like the Muppets).
Be sure that whatever you want to play them on hi-fi/in-car can read the media you use, and can decode MP3s...
Enjoy!

Answer 2

Good advice already, so I can't add to it. No, it's not illegal unless you were thinking of making multiple copies and selling them.

Audacity is very good and free and has some filters so you can probably improve the sound somewhat before you lay them down on CD.

Record to .wav if you can. It takes more space on your hard disk but you don't risk losing quality. MP3 is a compressed format and inevitably is lower quality, especially, I have found, where the track has big differences in volume (sudden loud passages followed immediately by quiet ones). It's worth sparing the extra hard disk space if you are going to burn to a CD and especially if you want to play around with filters.

Spend some time thinking what order to put the tracks in when you are planning the CD and you'll have a nice professional job!

Good luck!

Answer 3

you'll need a cable to connect the turntable/amplifier to your PC...

your sound card probably has a 3.5mm socket for 'line in' ... so you'll either need a stereo phono > 3.5mm jack cable OR a 3.5mm>3.5mm cable depending on which output from your amplifier you want to use.

in windows, there is a utility called 'sound recorder' that you can use to record audio from the 'line in' jack... this will record into wave format.

click on start>all programs> accessories> entertainment> sound recorder

or, you can use dbpoweramp's line in recording utility...a free download from -

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm

which can record from the 'line in' directly to mp3 or wav.

once you have set up the connections and software, do a few test recordings to ensure your input levels are not too high... if you have your amplifier too loud, it will create distortion in the recordings. once you have a good level for your recording, then you can proceed...

but it will still be a slow process - real time!