Vegas Sculptor’s Blog

Today I’d like to tell you about my new “gadget”. I know we have several people out there who like gadgets, and I don’t usually buy too many. But I recently bought something that I think almost all of you could probably use.

If you’re like me, you have at least one box of old albums packed away somewhere. You remember “albums” don’t you? You remember, those big, black, vinyl disks that make music when you play it on a “turntable”?

Well my albums have been packed away at least 20 years now. Lately I’ve transferred my CD’s to MP3’s that I can listen to on my portable MP3 player. I got to thinking about all my old albums and started wondering how to get them copied to the computer too.

Every solution that I found involved running cables from a turntable hooked to my stereo to the sound card on my computer, or running a turntable through a pre-amp then into the computer. Now the first problem is that in the last 20 years the belt and needle on my turntable have either been lost or turned to dust! Since nobody under 30 even knows what a turntable is, replacement parts are expensive and hard to find.

That’s when I discovered the new ION turntable that plugs into the USB port on your computer. No need to be near the stereo system, only one cable to plug into the USB. I checked prices and reviews and found the best price on Amazon.

The one I bought is the iTTUSB05 USB. It’s not the most expensive they offer, but it does everything I need. It came with everything needed to hook it up, and a copy of the Audacity music editing software you need to capture your music. For $99 it’s not much more than I would have spent trying to get my old turntable back into working condition. You even get free shipping!

So far I’ve converted 5 albums, and couldn’t be more pleased with the results. Of course the digital music isn’t going to sound any better than the album you are recording from, so cleaning the album before you try to record it helps the final quality.

With Audacity you can clean up some of the noise and remove any “pops” or “clicks” that are on the album. It takes a little practice using Audacity but the results are pretty good. One of my favorite Beatles albums has quite a few scratches on it, but I was able to select the pop made by the scratches and remove it. The final WAV file sounds much better than the album.

You can convert the files to audio CD using software like Windows Media Player, or you can convert to MP3 to put on your MP3 player.

If you’re missing your old albums and don’t want to spend the money to replace them (if you can even find them on CD), you might want to check out the ION turntable.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 9:57 pm and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.