Recommend a LP to CD conversion service?

November 26, 2008 6:47 AM

Recommend an LP to CD conversion service?

Hi!

I recently purchased an LP record that my parents played for us as a kid. LP players aren't very common these days, though, so I was wondering about converting it to CD -- I've seen quite a few ads on the internet for companies which offer to do this, but there's a pretty wide range of prices, and I haven't the foggiest idea who to go with. I'm hoping someone has a recommendation!

Local (I'm in Durham, NC) would be cool too.

posted by Comrade_robot to media & arts (7 answers total)

With a USB turntable, you can easily play and digitize LPs - I've seen them for as cheap as $100.
posted by mrmojoflying at 6:52 AM on November 26, 2008

As mrmojoflying recommended, I have a USB turntable, and it works like a charm. The investment might not be worth it, if this is a one time thing, but I love mine and haven't had a problem yet.
posted by YFiB at 7:02 AM on November 26, 2008

Yeah, I was really thinking of this as a one-off, which makes me hesitant to go ahead and buy a USB turntable.
posted by Comrade_robot at 7:29 AM on November 26, 2008

As I answered in this question, I like the AV Crew. About five years ago, I wanted to convert some vinyl to CD. They did a great job (cleaned albums, included decent artwork with listings of all songs, etc), and as I recall, the prices were pretty good. They even gave good advice for packing up albums to mail to them. They are in California, by the way.
posted by ObscureReferenceMan at 9:42 AM on November 26, 2008

i live in chapel hill and can do it for ya when i get back to town next week if you'd like. just drop me a mefi msg.
posted by noloveforned at 12:29 PM on November 26, 2008

Looks like noloveforned has you covered, but you also might want to check your local music stores (not the big chains). One of my town's local stores offers the service for $10 per LP.
posted by ourroute at 4:24 PM on November 26, 2008

It might be too late, and it sounds as if you probably don't have a turntable anyway, but I thought I'd put this here for the possible benefit of others: you don't have to have a USB turntable to digitize records. A normal, $20 yard-sale turntable works fine.

What you need is a turntable, a phono receiver (or a built-in phono amp on the turntable -- some of the cheaper ones have this), an RCA-to-minijack or minijack-to-minijack cord ($5 at Radio Shack), and a sound card with a line-in input. If you've got all this, you can digitize your records for free with the open-source program Audacity. Once you hook your receiver's line-out or headphone jack to your sound card's line-in, it's as easy as starting Audacity and hitting record, then playing your record as usual. You can even split the record into tracks and export to wav, ogg, or mp3, all from the same program.

If you have trouble figuring out how to connect your equipment, extensive instructions are here. The same process works for any kind of audio: you can record from tapes, 8-tracks, DVD or TV audio, the radio, or even another computer. It's a lot cheaper and easier than dealing with a USB turntable!
posted by vorfeed at 3:00 PM on December 1, 2008