Convert Your Vinyl to CD

27Jul/080

The flyer from London Drugs arrived on my doorstep yesterday and there was actually something that interested me in it, ie a USB turntable.

Most of us probably have a few boxes of orphaned music lying around. I just got rid of mine a couple of years ago because replacement equipment for listening to them had simply gotten too expensive and hard to find. Obviously, that makes me a casual listener rather than an music buff. Guilty as charged. Still, there were a lot of old jazz records in the mix which are rather hard to replace.

I'm not interested in the whole analogue vs digital battle. I suspect, in fact, that the analogue boosters are right. Be that as it may, digital won, and I personally can't tell the difference.

The turntable in the flyer is very simple in concept. Plug the usb cable into your computer. Play the record. Save as MP3. From there you can burn the file, load it into your ipod. Whatever. It comes with sound editing software, that lets you clean up hisses and scratches.

These things may have been around for a long time without my notice. Music is not really my thing. What got me was that someone had combined available technology in a novel way to really solve a problem for us. The other thing that surprised me was how cheap it was. London Drugs is selling the unit for $120. I found it on Amazon for $98. Can't beat that!

As always, there are cheaper as well as more expensive units around, but for most of us, this little puppy is 'just right'.