Yes, you are wrong. I did radio production for years, and never had any problems with doing this, though it’s not ideal. The real danger of blowing something up is putting a line output into a microphone input, or a speaker output into either a line or microphone input. You can even done one of those if you put an attenuator called a “pad” between the two. But that’s getting a bit far afield.
But it’s a good point – don’t make a mistake and run the line out from your stereo into a microphone jack on your PC.
Missed edit window – this is assuming your stereo system has a line out. Most older turntables don’t – they run into a special input called a pre-amp in the power amplifier, because their output is substantially lower than line level.
But if I understand the OP correctly, she has some kind of integrated stereo system, and the turntable is pretty much permanently built in and hard-wired to the tuner/amplifier, and maybe the speakers too, if it’s some kind of large console. My dad had a big thing like that, as large as a bedroom dresser. It had no outputs at all since even the speakers were built into the cabinet.
A lot of boom boxes are like that too, though they have CD players and/or a cassette player rather than a turntable. Since their speakers are attached too, they don’t bother adding any outputs because as far as they’re concerned everything you need is in the one box.
Sorry - been out of town and missed this post. My stereo isn’t one of those old monsters - it’s a bunch of black boxes (tuner, amp, cassette deck, CD deck) plus a turntable from an older stereo plugged into the whole setup. I didn’t know if it could be used as is or if I need to get a special turntable that’ll plug right into my computer.
A bazillion years ago, I figure out how to go directly from the stereo setup to my portable cassette player to record albums that way (circa 1960s/70s) but I didn’t consider that I could go right from the stereo components to the computer. Like I said, I thought I’d need a specific turntable.
Or you could bypass stereo/mono question by getting something like Mr. Me mentioned in post #15.
I suggest you don’t start spending money, though, until you listen to some of your albums and assess whether they are still in good enough shape to copy.
I’ll definitely listen first. Most of the albums have been boxed for more than 10 years - kept indoors away from damp and temperature extremes, but still, who knows?? So I guess step 1 is “listen” and that will determine what step 2 should be.
Possibly before step 1 would be, as RTFirefly mentioned, cleaning these albums. They can be quity dirty, even if they’ve been stored away for 10 years.
Or at least trying that with one album, and see how much difference it makes. And taking that into consideration when deciding.
I converted a lot of mine about 2 years ago. Used Audicity. It was great. As far as the editing and re-recording for scratches, low input volume input, whatever, I just threw them all on my iPod and let it play while I was out and about. Whenever I found a track that I had to fix, I would send an email to myself and edit that individual track. I got to listen to everything I did post-production and didn’t waste a lot of time. And it was a good time listening to the “good old day” tunes.
Another vote for the Audicity software. Although I did this on my old computer. I remember the installation was easy-peasy, but there was one problem I had to figure out with my sound card. The fix required another installation of something called “LAME” software (it wasn’t actually lame, but that was what it was named). That fixed it.
Saved everything on my external 3 TB drive so it wouldn’t go bad if my puter died. Then my external drive died. Lost everything.
Now I’m trying to start over and doing everything on my new WIN7 computer. And I have found the same problem with the sound card thing. Songs can be saved, but there’s an issue with the quality. Haven’t had the time to figure out the LAME software issue and installation, but I’ve been busy with the new job.
(FCM, sorry if this is a hijack, but I feel your pain.)
Long gone (AFAIK) poster fishbicycle did this for a living. This thread, although old, contains a lot of good advice. There might be better solutions nowadays, but I can’t help you there.
Thanks, that was an interesting thread. Fishbicycle hasn’t posted since early 2008. The “Cool Edit” software under discussion is now known as Adobe Audition and is a minimum of $500 for an annual subscription.
I don’t know if Audacity even existed 8 years ago when the thread was active. It would have been interesting to get fishbicyle’s take on it. According to Wiki, Audacity is one of the most popular shareware programs on the web, having more than 75 million downloads by last year.