Has anybody tried the ION Turntable?
It seems to connect directly to your computer and allow you to burn CDs from your old vinyl albums.
The reviews on Amazon are mostly positive. Either it seems to work very well or not at all, not unusual for electronics.
Any comments or recommendations for how best to use it?
Are there alternatives you’d suggest instead?
Never used it. Sorry. But is there an easy way to do that with tapes (with track separation, etc.)? I have a shitload of those things.
I used a seperate device that I bought at a Circuit City. It was basically a box that had RCA jacks on one side and USB on the other.
It worked OK. The software was not very user friendly but I was able to record, seperate tracks and do some noise reduction and then port them into my iTunes. I would only do this for something that I couldn’t buy on line or on CD. The hassel wasn’t worth it. (IMHO)
Sorry I can’t remember the name of it. I gave the device to a neighbor when I was done. IIRC it cost about $30.
Super cool, Zebra. Thanks. I’ve been using a digital tape deck and sound editing software, but track separation is a total bitch.
Doesn’t whatever software you record in have an option to highlight a track and go to File | Save Selection As? If you just have a song and a space and a song and a space, etc., it’s extremely uncomplicated to make single tracks in a wave editor. An alternative would be to get the freeware CDWave. Record a whole side and save it as one big file. Open it up in CDWave and put the cursor at the start of the next song, and hit “Split” and so on for each song. I’m stumped about what’s so difficult about track splitting.
I have a huge collection of LPs and 78s (huge = thousands) and many of them will never, ever be commercially digitized. So I tried out the ION USB (for the LPs, anyway, since it doesn’t do 78 rpm.)
I was hoping for an easier experience than what I had been doing (running my existing turntable through a preamp and into my sound card.) What a disappointment.
It “features” the most cheapass plastic construction I’ve ever seen, along with a crappy tonearm that was difficult to adjust for proper balance and tracking. Plus the software that comes with it is nothing special - just Audacity, which of course is available everywhere on the web for free.
Zebra, thanks for the heads-up about the RCA/USB converter. Never knew anyone made one of those, so I never thought to look for it. I’m going to give that a try.