Originally Posted by
MikeA
I have a very eclectic collection of vinyl and probably couldn't come close to listing it without taking an afternoon and sorting them out. I know I have the James Gang platters. Most of Fleetwood Mac both before and during the association with Nicks and Buckingham. Some Zep. Doobies. Boston. Kansas. Peter Paul and Mary. CSN&Y. Buffalo Springfield. Yes. A couple of Beatles (Abby Road and White and Rubber Soul and maybe Sgt Peppers). Several of the outlaw albums (Waylon, Willy, Hank Jr.) Melanie. Jewel. Joplin. Hendrix.
Basically, I never trashed an album and never sold one. However, after Verna and I hooked up, I gave several to my niece who babysat our kids a lot. Unfortunately, those that I gave to her are now long gone.
Okay, you have the vinyl and you listen to them on the patio. Do you anything else with them? If you still have a turntable you can buy a cheap little turntable amp that you can plug into and run the output to your line-in on your sound card. It's simple from that point to "rip" the vinyl to any digital format that your capture program can handle.
There is "Audacity" which is a freeware program that will record and save ripped sessions into virtually any format you wish (MP3 WAV etc....but not WMP...Microsoft has not released that format nor has Apple released MPEG4).
Once you have them captured, you can go back in with Audacity or even EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and actually "remaster" them to a degree. I say to a degree because they will not be "better than new" no matter how careful you are. But if there are obnoxious "pops" you can isolate those and remove them pretty much as simple as doing a cut and paste operation on a Word Document.
It is a very tedious process.