Your vinyl records and 8-track tapes are pining to be played again. And your computer is willing to oblige them.
This is the age of digital music and, with a little bit of finesse, you can convert just about any type of audio - whether it's on CDs, vinyl, cassettes, 8-tracks or even a live performance of your kid playing his violin - to music files on your computer's hard drive.
And, with the right music-editing software such as Tracer's Diamond Cut or Magix's Audio Cleaning Lab, you'll even be able to "re-master" your new recordings and filter out annoying pops, crackles and static.
Just don't expect miracles - a scratched record is still going to sound more or less like a scratched record. But if you've kept your vinyl or cassette collection in reasonably good shape over the years, copying your Beatles albums and Broadway 8-tracks to a computer has some real advantages:
Convenience: With your songs stored on a hard drive, you can play them on your computer with a click of the mouse. Or you can burn the tracks onto an audio CD that you can pop into your home or car stereo. No more stuffing records into album sleeves, and no more rewinding tapes.
Preservation: Every time you play a record, you risk scratching a treasured keepsake (if you've kept it around this long, yes, it's a keepsake). Cassettes are also vulnerable to wear. In fact, every time you play a record or magnetic tape, it degrades. Making digital duplicates not only ensures that you have backups, but also saves the originals.
Cost: It doesn't take much to turn your PC into a home-recording box. You'll need a basic sound card with a line-in jack (found on almost all computers,) an RCA-to-1/8-inch headphone adapter cable ( $2 at Radio Shack) and an encoder program with an option for line-in recording.
MusicMatch Jukebox and RealNetworks' RealJukebox 2 are easy to use and produce good results. Free demo versions of these programs and similar software are available on the World Wide Web or in stores. MusicMatch costs $25 for the deluxe version.
Quality: Re-mastering is easily done with many free programs available on Web sites such as CNET's www.download.com. Depending on the quality of the originals, a proficient piece of software can doctor your recordings so they sound better than before.
Travel: Many of today's digital music players, including Apple's iPod and Creative's Nomad Jukebox, can store massive amounts of music - up to 400 albums' worth - in your shirt pocket or on a belt clip. Imagine going to a party and having every album, every cassette, and every 8-track you own in the palm of your hand.
The software magic in this process involves "sampling" the audio to turn it into a stream of digital ones and zeros, then turning those bits into MP3 files - the computer format that compresses audio into small, easy-to-handle tracks. MP3 "encoders," as they're known, do this by filtering out portions of sound that the human ear can't hear. The result is high-quality audio that occupies relatively small amounts of space - about 3 megabytes for the average three-minute album track.
If you have 100 albums, or about 1,500 songs, you'll be able to put your entire music collection on a decent-size hard drive (converted to MP3, they'll occupy about 5 GB of your disk space). Or you can simply record all the albums on to seven data CDs that any computer can play.
Of course, if you're a purist and don't want to lose a single detail, you can store your recordings in standard wave sound files, which take up 10 times as much space. This method results in clean, "loss-less" reproduction.
There are many options to choose from when it comes to software. Each audio program uses a slightly different method but most are fairly simple. Let's look at what it takes to transfer tracks on vinyl records from a basic stereo system to a PC using MusicMatch Jukebox.
The hardest part of the process is getting your stereo and your PC close enough to run a cable between them. This may involve moving a couple of components temporarily.
The trick is to run an RCA cable (the cords with red and white jacks on either end) from your computer to the amplifier/receiver of your stereo system.
Plug one end of the RCA cable into the "line out" ports on your stereo. Plug the other end into the 1/8-inch adapter, and slide the adapter plug into the "line in" jack on your computer.
That's all the hardware you'll need. Now, open up MusicMatch Jukebox. Choose "Options," "Recorder," "Source" and finally "Line In." Select MP3 from the Options menu if you want to record in compressed format to save space.
Click MusicMatch's "Record" button and then start the record playing. The sound from your external source, in this case your turntable, is now piping into your PC, where it's being stored.
Click on Stop after you've finished your first track and listen to it on the computer. If it sounds great, your PC is already tuned up nicely for sound. If it sounds a little muffled or quiet, you'll want to play with your computer's Recording Control option and adjust the volume levels until you get everything sounding just right.
My advice for recording from an album is to record one track at a time. You can find software that claims to record an entire album at once and separate it into tracks automatically, but I've yet to find a program that does this flawlessly. You'll end up with a single file with two or three or even five tracks on it, because the software wasn't able to effectively "hear" the silence between the tracks and separate them.
For more advanced sound editing, there are commercial programs such as Audio Cleaning Lab that provide more sophisticated filtering of background noise and even enable you to splice in new sounds or a new mix altogether.
That's all there is to it. This recording method will cost you about $10, provided you already have a sound card with a line-in jack.
Your recording capabilities don't end with your stereo, either. Using a microphone, you can use MusicMatch or whatever software you prefer to record any live sound event in your house - a birthday party, your son's piano practice or even your own karaoke singing, if you can bear to listen to it.
If you catch the home-recording bug and money is no object, you can find commercial MP3 jukeboxes (made by AudioRequest, Hewlett-Packard and Lansonic) that sell for $1,000 and up. These will hook directly to your stereo as a dedicated music recorder, complete with hard drives.
For now, try the $10 method. You'll see that you can convert those records and tapes easily and preserve your vinyl for playing only on very retro occasions.