This article appeared in the November 2000 WYSIWYG newsletter.
Old Songs on a New CD
by Jack Vander-Schrier
A couple of weeks ago I was talking to my wife, and she was saying how hard it is to find the CD's for songs she used to listen to on her Record Player. So we decided to break out the boxes of albums that have 15-30 years of dust on them and look at them. I looked around the house and realized that I didn't have a turntable to play any of them on.
I went down to my local Audio Store on Van Dyke and found an in-the-box Technics turntable for $100.00 with audio outputs on it. I brought it home and attached it to my stereo system which also had a headphone jack on it. As usual, I don't normally have headphone jacks laying around the house, so I went to my friendly Radio Shack and got a 10 foot long headphone jack cord with a headphone jack at one end and an RCA jack at the other end. I plugged one end into my stereo system and the other end into the "Audio In" on my computer.
Now the problem was how to listen to it on my PC. I ran across a program called Music Match Jukebox, that can be downloaded at http://www.musicmatch.com. After loading the program, I turned on the recorder portion of the program and set the default to record from "Line In Jack". I then started up the turntable, and the music played through my computer speakers and recorded one track after another. I was able to name the artist, the track, and the genre of music. This created a list of all of the songs on the various records we had. Then, after sorting the list into song order, I began to check off the various songs that I liked. I put these songs into a playlist, and then with the click of the write CD button, my CD writer began to create my own CD with the songs that I like to listen to. After making a couple of adjustments, such as setting my writer up for 2X CD write, I was able to make clear copies of all of my record albums. So if you have some albums you can't find on CD's, or you can only find remakes, why not get some equipment together and burn your own CD's?
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