Years ago, I converted some cassette tapes to digital using an old Walkman and a cord from Radio Shack. The cord connected the headphone plug of the Walkman to my sound card’s Line In port, and I used a shareware sound recording program to create and edit the files. It wasn’t hard at all. You should be able to do something similar with a record player.
Alternatively, could you just borrow a laptop from a friend, or pick one up for cheap?
Be careful with that approach: many laptops only have mono input to their sound cards. That would suck!
That’s especially handy because I’ve got some music only on store-bought cassettes, and it looks like the audio input for that could be a phonograph, a cassette deck, or whatever.
And thanks for mentioning DiscWasher. One of my big questions has been, what’s the best way to clean one’s LPs to prep for the LP-to-digital conversion? I’ll have to get some.
I know what you mean, so don’t take this as a rebuttal of any sort, but I can’t resist saying that it’s probably best if I didn’t approach it the same way. Can’t say I was ever that worried about sound quality when making a cassette; they were more for portability (especially to have music in the car) than anything else. It wasn’t like I envisioned a cassette ever being my archival copy of a piece of music.
But in doing the vinyl-to-digital thing, archival is exactly what most of us have in mind: make one good digital recording from an LP, then never play the LP itself again.
I have a little component I bought six years ago for $50 which connects the audio out of the stereo with a usb part for a laptop. The advantage is that it works for tapes (I had lots of them) and vinyl. Sound quality is great. In fact a lot of the tapes were really old and the Roxio software which came with it cleaned up the sound a lot.
It wouldn’t work too well over 50 feet, but it shouldn’t be hard to borrow a laptop or even move the PC - they aren’t that heavy!
I have some albums and singles I never saw on CD, and the tapes are things like Dylan bootlegs which still haven’t been officially released, so digitizing them was great.
I just moved the (1980’s) turntable ant (1960’s) receiver next to the computer and ran through the vinyl and then a cassette deck (plugged into “aux”, not “phono”). The “line out” went innto the sound card’s “line in”.
Any good audio software will let you see the waveform - magnify the spikes, and clip the “spikes” - those are the artifacts of the vinyl.
and when recording audio into the computer unprocessed (using ‘line in’ of the sound card) always save the file and make a copy of it. do your noise reduction or other manipulations on the copy. that way you can always retry with another copy of the original.
Back in the mid or late 90s, I transferred a ton of old jazz albums to CD, and those have since been back up on computer hard drive.
Is there some way to basically put the needle down on the turntable, feed it into the audio-in of your sound card, capture the sound at whatever quality, and then (this is the trick) break it into tracks and based on the album title and A/B side, automatically label the tracks?
I’d think that manually naming each track would be a monotonous and LONG process for anything but the tiniest vinyl collection
When you rip CDs whatever program you use goes out to the internet to find the track names. I suppose if you make a CD of the album it might figure out the track names if you get lucky. id didn’t for me. This stuff often screws up regular CDs.
One of my retirement projects is to go through my music and fix all the bad names.
In any case the time required to enter track names is trivial compared to the time required to play through the vinyl which is, as mentioned, done in real time.
I’ve been doing this, starting in 2006, using an ION turntable and the (free) Audacity software.
It all works great. And, believe me, if a schlub like I can learn to do this, anybody can! The “click removal” feature is a delight!
I did buy a copy of “Soundsoap,” a noise-reduction program, but I never could figure out how to use it.
recording software may have a ‘cut into tracks’ feature as one of the processing features. it hunts for the couple second silence and splits the file at that point. it will messes up albums which have silent parts as part of the music, you will need to do those manually.
Yeah, I did the line out -> line in thing with my '73 Panasonic when the needle was still good. Only did one track and it sounded terrible but I’m guessing a program to filter out the pops & crackles would have helped immensely.
Here is one other alternative that also doesn’t wear your collection out. 
All for less than $20K.
/hijack As a side note, Grado and Ortofon still make cartridges for most turntables and the prices aren’t too ridiculous to start. /end hijack.
I’ve used the method beowulff mentioned, and it works well, if slowly. I was always an audio perfectionist, and you can get CD quality results witha nice turntable and cartridge.
I didn’t always have clickrepair, but it does work great. it even makes a separate audio file of just the clicks, for your amusement I guess.
Sometimes you just can’t get some stuff on CD. I’ve also found some albums with changes from the album release to the CD. It amazes me that they make these changes - why?
I might start a thread on that…
Since I don’t care about CD quality and don’t mind the scratches and pops, I just use an Ion turntable and the basic software that it comes with. I’ve recorded a shitload of jazz albums this way and they sound just fine, but it’s a really tedious real-time effort to do it, even with software that identifies breaks between songs.
I actually asked my wife how my SIL accomplished this when she transferred my FIL’s vinyl collection onto MP3 files for his iPod, and apparently she went after it the long and horrible way.
I don’t have the patience… I’d probably get a week in and say screw it, and figure out exactly which albums I can’t just get in digital format, and concentrate on those, while just getting the rest as used CDs (MUCH easier to rip) or in digital format.
I concur with this. About ten years ago, I spent many, many hours laboriously transferring my LP collection to my computer. I whiled away countless evenings cleaning my LPs, babysitting them as they played, running them through noise-reduction software, carefully splitting them into tracks, typing in metadata, etc., etc., etc.
I have long since replaced almost all of those transfers with pristine digital files, either downloaded from sources like Amazon or ripped from CDs (most of which were bought cheaply from eBay or thrift stores). Many of those same recordings are now available on the various streaming services as well.
It’s fun and interesting for the first three or four discs, but it eventually becomes a tedious and VERY TIME-CONSUMING chore, and the results are never going to sound as good as a file ripped from a CD or downloaded. IMHO, ripping LPs just isn’t worth the effort unless you have some incredibly obscure rarities. In my whole LP collection, I only had ONE disc that has never shown up anywhere in a digital format.
Here is the device I mentioned. It appears to still be available.
It’s only tedious if you have a record in poor condition that requires painstaking click and pop removal (i.e. via software like Audacity). With an album in decent shape, I’ve found the sound to be as good or better overall than that available in digital files.
And by using existing records (or ones found cheaply on sale used), I don’t have to buy individual tracks for a buck or more each, or subscribe to a service to “borrow” them.