I've discovered time travel...

[roadie gal]

I'm old enough to have a rather large collection of vinyl records. Unfortunately, I almost never play them. So, a while back I bought a turntable that will plug into the computer so I can download my records onto CDs and the MP3.

All this week I've been playing my old favorites from high school and college and the early 80s. Wow! Time travel! Each song transports me right back to those days.

Right now I'm into the Kingston Trio. I'm not old enough to have caught them the first time around, but I remember being a kid and listening to them with my parents. The other night my SO had to put up with my Neil Diamond collection (high school) and Whitney Houston's first album (med school). Such fun!

[Zen]

Do you have a link for that product?

[Irulan]

Do you have a link for that product?

Costco has a version for less than $200. Found this out AFTER I donated over 700 unusual and rare albums to the local community radio station....

[Zen]

I don't belong.
I still have a regular turntable I use.

[Mr. Bloom]

Music and memories have the amazing ability to transform the soul, don't they!

Since I drive alot, sometimes I get the same thing listening to the 70's and 80s station on my satellite radio...then I go to iTunes and download the song and Apple gets another $ of mine...and then my soul isn't transformed anymore

[roadie gal]

Do you have a link for that product?

I have an ION brand one. Honestly, I wouldn't recommend it. The stylus is so heavy that I had to tape $1.50 in quarters to the back end to keep it from skating across my records. (That took about 3 hours to figure out after diddling with the anti-skate device and taping money, one cent at a time, to the back end.) Once I got it balanced, though, it was easy to use. There are certainly much better ones out there. The only good thing about this one is that it was less than $100.

If you plug the turntable into the computer, via the line-out on the receiver to the line-in on the computer, you do this without a USB turntable. You can download the Audacity program for free http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. This is the part that makes it easy to record your vinyl onto the computer. Then you need a second program to put that download onto your CDs or MP3. (I learned this after I bought the USB turntable.)

The nice thing about the program is that you can just record the whole side of the album and then easily add the song breaks afterward. Otherwise you have to stop the recording after each song to get a break. If you don't have breaks then the CD sees the entire side as one song. There's no way to skip from song to song.

Sorry this got so long.