LP 2 CD, one of the many audio conversion products offered by Ion Audio, lets you convert your vinyl records directly onto a CD or onto your Mac.
I’ve finally imported my entire CD collection into iTunes, but what about my old cassette tapes and LPs? I can’t just repurchase them from the iTunes Store, because my cassettes are filled with my own authored music and my LPs are out-of-print.
Upon receiving your question, we let out a big sigh and looked over at a dusty stack of cassette tapes that we’ve also been meaning to convert--for the last 10 years! Fortunately, this conversion is a relatively painless process thanks to a company called Ion Audio, which makes a variety of products for turning your analog audio into digital format. Their product line includes the following:
LP 2 Flash ($199.99, www.ionaudio.com) is a turntable that rips your LPs directly to a USB flash drive, an SD media card, or your Mac. LP Dock ($249) is a turntable that rips LPs directly to your Mac, an iPod (fifth generation or classic), or an iPod nano (second or third generation). LP 2 CD ($399) is a turntable that rips LPs directly to CDs or to your Mac. We reviewed a turntable from Numark in this issue called the TTi ($449, www.numark.com) on p86 that also digitizes music LPs.
Tape 2 PC ($149.99, www.ionaudio.com) is a cassette deck that rips your tapes to your Mac in MP3 format. It also doubles as a real dual-dubbing cassette deck that you can plug into any stereo system.
bobgroome
February 07, 2009 at 9:18pm
I just connect my turntable & pre-amp to the audio input jack of my MacBook. Play the song into iTunes and I'm done. I have a good turntable and preamp I usually use with my stereo system and it works great.
craigrmeyer
January 13, 2009 at 5:03pm
It deserves mention that instead of investing the money and hassle required to digitize cassette tapes and records at home, one can instead use an outside audio digitization service, like namely mine: www.ReclaimMedia.com.
For smaller jobs it's flat-out cheaper, and for larger jobs we're still cheaper if you just consider that your free time is worth at least minimum wage. Our automation is so good that the cheapest labor in America is still more expensive than our super-custom automated system.
I've written an article "Why Not Digitize My Tapes and Records at Home?" that's specifically about this. Before sinking any more money or life into digitizing audio at home, you really owe it to yourself to give it a look and decide whether its arguments apply to you.
I also want to point out that our equipment is of MUCH finer quality, and much more meticulously maintained, than anything someone will happen to have at home. So we're bound to give you a better signal.
Furthermore, we include a bunch of other steps that are otherwise a hassle like:
1: Locating the track points between songs.
2: Printing/tagging album art for records.
3: Typing in all the artist/album/song metadata.
4: Physical cleaning of all records we do to remove the dirt and dust that gets into the gooves and causes the "crackle" sound.
5: Digital click and pop filtering that works incredibly well at removing the "pop's" that come from the needle passing over scratches.
Okay thanks!
--Craig Meyer
Founder, Reclaim Media
nigelg
January 12, 2009 at 7:30am
these turntables don't do vinyl any justice. There are a few turntable manufacturers of quality turntables out there that give a much better sound transfer( project-a european turntable specialist makes agreat sounding table with a built in usb for analog to digital transfer direct to a mac).For those who already own good turntables there are stand alone phono stages with built in converters at very reasonable prices!
