[johnfowles]

dHi Rainbow Trout down there in Tennessee
Wirh all due respect friends talk about making a mountain of a molehill.
regarding the Crosley monstrosity one reviewer on that amazon page summed it up nicely
"If you bought a turntable for $25 you would expect it to be better than this. The tone arm is not properly balanced and worst of all the speed is not consistent and is not adjustbale. This product is virtually worthless for converting LP's to CD's if you have any senstivity to sound quality. Stay away from this!"
the next reviewer concurred in his piece he entitled
"A Serious Piece of GARBAGE!!!!!!!,"
I woud have replied myself yesterday to say that basically all one needs is a turntable (or a good audio cassette player), a suitable connecting cable then use the freeware version of Musicmatch Jukebox, which previously was easily downloadable as a stand alone installation program. This great program can produce basic CD compatible
wav files or convert to various qualities of mp3. Then you might like to clean up the sound (remove tape his or LP pops and crackles with anmother freeware program
However unfortunately MMJB was taken over by Yahoo. so now whenever I open my old MusicMatch version 11 I get an annoying Yahoo popup telling me things I really do not want to know about the replacement Yahoo music download service
I will be back with more thoughts on the Yah_Bloody_Hoo (ex Musicmatch) Jukebox but meanwhile present a few thoughts for you to ponder
you will need:-

• patience and/or perseverance (as with everything computer connected)

• a turntable
  
• a CD burner built- in to your computer (or an extenal version that will plug into a spare USB socket (you know the stoopidly designed thin rectangular hole where you quite unecessarily have to find which is top bottom left and right before the USB plug will fit, such crass design ineptitude!!
  
• The CD burning software supplied with your computer or the CD burner
  such as Nero Burning/Express or an Adeptec/Sonic/Roxio product like Easy CD Creator
  
• a suitable connecting cord (to plug into whatever output your turntable etc has and the computer's line in)
  
• some free software for recording the input then burning to a CD
  
• blank CDs (any CD-R IS suitable not just those specifically marked "audio"; that is a recording industry con trick to make
  you pay more as the higher price includes a royalty amount

So in essence you are more than half way to digitising your vinyls as you still have a turntable, and if you have Windows XP you may well have the best recording program (MusicMatch) already albeit with a customised name by Dell for example
all you need to do is locate (half hidden on the back of your computer) a "line-in" socket, most PCs seem to have three small sockets in row and you should find one with a little microphone symble (into which you could plug an err umm microphone for voice recording .. or to use a voice recognition program)
Another socket has a representation of a pair of headphones into which one plugs err umm headphones or a loudspeaker system, then by a process of elimination the other socket is "line in"

In fact any sound device that has an audio output can be plugged into the line-in such a ipods,radios, tape recorders of all shapes and sizes, I have succesfuly made CDs from old audio cassettes by simply connecting the headphone output of a large boombox
As I see it the main complication seems to be ensuring that your turntable output (from the pick up) is of the correct strength to feed into the computer's sound card I suggest some reading to understand this point unless anybody else here is able to and would like to succinctly explain??
I found many useful results when I googled for
"tutorial vinyl to CD" the results total was over 2 milion allegedly
This one looks pretty straightforwards if you can get the non-cached original to open I could not yesterday
http://www.dak.com/reviews/Tutorial_LP_record2.cfm
As do
http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/tut...nyl-lps-to-cd/
http://www.ganymede.hemscott.net/tutorial.htm
beware of
http://dak.com their pages either will not open or if they do they try to flog you a $25.00 kit whereas most software is available as freeware or you already have it
an interesting bookmark list is at
http://www.netvouz.com/beeb49/tag/vinyl
Get either the free trial of ripvinyl or buy it from
http://www.ripvinyl.com/
the free demo version
"The demonstration version is limited in that it inserts a tone 6 seconds into each track for one second. It is fully functional in every other regard."
I think I recall that the main use/selling point of ripvinyl is its ability to automaticaly detect the silence between tracks on a vinyl album which then makes splitting into separate song tracks easier. When making mp3s from an audio cassettes however I found it easy to start and stop and this enabled me to name the next recorded track as I progressed. To each his own!
So next download some freeware from
1 for recording MusicMatch
Complication (due to aforementioned Yahoo takeover (I'll be back)
2 for cleaning up (hiss or Snap Crackle and Pop to coin a phrase) removal
[SIZE=2]www.acoustica.com/download.htm]acoustica.
3 for CD burning (unless you already have Nero for example)
Or MusicMatch might suit,sorry I am not sure about that
there ARE many freeware programs out there however such as CDburnerXP
just try a few to see which one suits you best