Last year Emma gave me an iPod for Christmas – its been great for trips and such, but I have a collection of 300+ albums that I don’t listen to much anymore. I recently saw an ad for a gadget that I hoped would make my older music more accessible. Last Tuesday it arrived. After all the turkey and family time, I took a little time for myself and cleared my desktop – and hooked up my
new Griffin
iMic. Its a small adapter about the size of a York Peppermint with a short USB cable on one end, and a 1/8 headphone jack at the other (they even provide the stereo Y cable for a turntable)

Once I had the turntable setup (adjust tracking and antiskating), I started the Final Vinyl application that was provided with the iMic. Flip the switch from Mic to Line, in the software turn on the EQ and set the Gain to 20db. It was actually pretty easy (tho I could have used more lighting on my desk).
I ran through a song or two to get the onscreen gain control slider set right., then record the song.
I saved the files as AIFF – a 5 min rock song is about 50 megs – drag into iTunes, then “convert to AAC” and the resulting file is around 4-5 megs. Then delete the aiff from iTunes.
I usually put “from LP” into the notes section of iTunes, and lookup the cover art (Amazon).

Its not perfect and I’m not going to load all of my old albums into my iTunes library,
– there are a few pops and crackles, although I could open up a visual editor window and clean them up & trim the songs a bit tighter, if Ireally wanted to take the time and hand edit the songfiles further,
but for a very quick dump from vinyl to MP3/AAC, it really worked well.