Rippin' Vinyl

As a quirk of my formative years, most of my music collection is on vinyl. Heck, one album is titled "Vinyl Confession", not "CD Confessions", nor "Digital Confessions", but "Vinyl Confessions" (Kansas-1982). I have about 120 LPs while only about 75 CDs. And I've never bought an MP3 or anything in a digital format, no napster, no i-tunes, no wal-tunes, etc. And while I have a couple "MP3 players", I'll never own an I-pod!

So tonight while doing other tasks, I'm ripping vinyl. Courtesy of an ION USB turntable.

On the Turntable tonight:
- Styx: Cornerstone
- Zebra: 3.V
- Europe: Final Countdown (Special request from the SandCastle Prince. Apparently it's big in the cartoon set these days)

Lessons learned
Audacity is by far the way to go, once you learn to use it. ION's cheat sheet ("Audacity Software Guide") is pretty good. In fact, I'd say they hit exactly the right mix of how to's and why's.

They offer their own ripping software but it requires far too much interactivity and requires i-tunes. Audacity lets me rip away and come back to clean up the pops and chop up the tracks later.

In a purely cost/benefit analysis, depending on how you value your time, one could make a pretty good argument for either buying the track in digital format, or at least the CD to RIP is a cheaper way to go. CD's can be ripped hands off in a couple minutes, while Vinyl takes about an hour per LP. But I'm enjoying the oldies. Most of my vinyl is near three decades old. Heck, a couple have never been opened because I accidentally bought duplicates.