Transferring music from LP to CD is not really too difficult. Anyone could probably do it if they were inclined. Making a quality CD as the end product will take a little more time, and hopefully this tutorial will help by showing some of the tricks I have picked up in the last few years of transferring vinyl to CD using a computer.
There are a lot of other possibilities and methods for doing this, but I am going to limit the method to what I currently use and avoid too many alternatives. This is mainly to simplify the method for people who are not familiar with it. Once you have successfully transferred a couple of LPs you can experiment with other software etc. There are links to other tutorials here or see the links section.
A vinyl record is a physical analogue representation of sound. This means that the sound is recorded as wiggles in a groove cut into the surface of a flat piece of plastic. The groove is a long spiral that runs from the outer edge in toward the central label. A very small stylus sits inside this groove and detects the wiggles, making an electrical signal that is fed into the amplifier. Because it is a physical recording, other physical things can affect the recording and the sound. For example, dirt inside the groove will move the stylus and you will hear clicks or crackles from the speakers. Any physical damage to the groove such as a scratch will also be sensed by the stylus and be amplified through the speakers. This noise is one of the problems with playing vinyl records, but you can do something about it. You can physically clean the dirt off records, and you can electronically reduce the effects of clicks and pops.
Despite what you might think, a good quality record turntable and cartridge can sound very good playing a record. There are many people who would tell you that the sound of vinyl is much better than the sound of CDs. Whether or not you believe this is probably based on the quality of turntables and records you have heard. Provided the equipment is decent, set up correctly and the recording itself sounds good, there is no reason why a vinyl record should be dismissed as unacceptable quality.
Generally, very few people have heard records played on a good quality turntable. I remember our family turntable as an old Garrard turntable that folded out of a console radiogram with a thump. It was not too bad for it's time, but it was typical of most peoples stereo systems of the 1960s and 1970s. At that time very few people knew how to set up or maintain a turntable (probably fewer do now). If a record jumped, we stuck a coin on with sticky tape. This thing let you put a stack of records on the spindle, and at the end of one, the tonearm moved out of the way (usually) while the next one dropped onto the ones sitting on the platter. The records we played were never cleaned, and many of them were really played to death. Remember this next time you think of the sound of vinyl. Did you treat your records with respect, or did they suffer a series of abuses and reward you with the results?
So what should we look for if we are going to resurrect the vinyl collection?
That is it, all you need to do to make a decent recording! The sections of this tutorial will go through these points in detail.