I stum­bled across a tuto­r­ial from Macin­struct a couple of weeks ago on how to import vinyl records into dig­i­tal files.

• How to Trans­fer LP Records to Your Mac

The tuto­r­ial seemed straight­for­ward enough and more impor­tantly, free. All you need for hard­ware is a Mac, record player and a receiver with a head­phone jack. The only thing left after that is an audio cord and one of those funny head­phone plug things. I had one laying around from the last set of head­phones I bought. The soft­ware used in the tutur­ial is the Audac­ity (open-​source) and the LAME codec (for con­vert­ing to mp3).

I spent the better part of the week­end work­ing on import­ing my records. It’s a happy time for me, since I do love my records. The only prob­lem is that I never actu­ally lis­tened to them. About six months ago I gave up and moved my whole stereo to the base­ment. The plan was to trade it in for one of those nifty iPod stereo thingys. Well, I have yet to actu­ally buy any sort of iPod stereo, and my records, until last week­end were still just records. I’ve been using my PS2 for a stereo. Sigh.

I’m happy to report that the whole process is pretty easy. Every­thing listed in the tuto­r­ial works as they say it does. The sound qual­ity is as expected, not ter­ri­bly good, but it sure beats replac­ing my record col­lec­tion with CDs or iTunes songs. The process is very slow though. I mean, you do have to actu­ally sit there and play the records in real time while they import. But, as far as I know, there’s no way around that.

So for now I’m enjoy­ing my long lost B-52’s, Blondie, Blonde Red­head and Tom Waits albums.