Move Your Old LP Music to the New World

Listen up, Dads. If you were a lucky guy, you got a nice new MP3 player or iPod for Father's Day. So now it's time to face the music. Moving music from a CD to a portable device is easy enough by using iTunes or Windows Media Player to rip the CD. But what about those cassettes and LPs? No need to leave those golden oldies behind.

I caught up with Grace Kang, a spokeswoman for RadioShack, last week and since RadioShack is the King of Cables, I asked for  the simplest way for new MP3 Dad to get his old music ported over.

What You'll Need: The cable is the secret sauce here. You'll want a cable like the Belkin PureAV Blue Series Audio Cable or Monster Interlink 400 MKII, plus software for your computer that can record the incoming music. Audacity is a good one for PCs. GarageBand, a part of the iLife series, is for Macs. (You can also use an iMic which connects to your USB and is reported to have better sound quality than the analog headphone jack.)

What To Do: First, move your music to your PC. Put your turntable or cassette player near your PC (or vice versa) and use the male-to-male stereo audio cable between the two. This cable connects the audio-out port (in other words, the headphone jack) on your cassette player or turntable to the audio-in port on the PC.

Install Audacity or GarageBand on your PC so you can record the incoming audio. The programs will direct you to push "record" on your computer and push "play" on your cassette player or turntable. As the music plays on your player, the software should indicate that your music is transferring to your computer. If you've got an old turntable, you may want to hook up through a receiver to amplify and equalize the sound, or you can use the software programs to amplify the sound after you've recorded it.

Once your music has downloaded to your computer, you'll transfer it from the PC to your new audio player. To do this, connect your audio device to the PC. You can use the software that came with your player or use something like iTunes, which will search your disk for newly added music and ask if you want to transfer it to your player. Or, you can manually move your music by clicking and dragging individual songs or playlists from your music library to your digital music player.

 

Elvis lives! And so will all of your other great vinyl and tape collections.

(Special thanks to Fensterbme for the photo.)