OH would like to rip some old vinyl to the computer. I guess he needs a USB turntable. Can anyone recommend one in particular ? Amazon has lots, but I’m wary of believing the comments - the ones that say a particular turntable is great, and the others that say they never got it to work, or it was grubby and second-hand.
Digitising stuff is a bit last decade, is there a particular reason for doing so rather than using a streaming service?
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I don’t know about Fleurs other half, but I like to have ‘my’ music saved, and don’t like streaming services. It also allows me to encode at a high nitrate and to EQ the music to suit my tastes if I want. If encoding from vinyl it’s likely to sound somewhat different from the streamed music too - maybe not technically better, but different, certainly. And if it’s not mainstream then may not even be available.
And to me, streaming seems so ‘disposable’, cheapening music to be almost valueless. Modern, sure, but I just recoil from it.
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You can’t go wrong with one of these
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It’s an option, yes. I use Spotify but it’s not the same as listening to your own music library whenever you want. I can’t see OH fiddling around with a streaming service. He’s a bit more last decade than me and like Ancient Mariner he wants to ‘have’ his own music.
Many thanks Mark. I’ll have a look at it. I’ve already got Audacity.
I used to be like that. A few house moves cured me.
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A box of USB sticks and a small external drive don’t take up much space?
I haven’t finished yet but am slowly transferring everything. However vinyl remains popular, a friend gave us three of his records a few weeks back!
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It IS a very old fashioned way to look at it, but my musical enjoyment is still rooted in the time when I’d go to the local record shop and see what they had in, or go to the place in Addiscombe where they would get unusual import albums intended for other markets. There would also be a connection between the music being played and the album cover, sometimes containing bits of info about the band or pictures you hadn’t seen.
There’s an enormous arrany of music available, and this approach enables me to remain in touch and familiar with ‘my’ music, rather than listening to a random plethora of tunes, some of which I may know, selected by someone or something else. It doesn’t matter whether anyone else agrees or not - this is how it works for me.
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That’s IT, in a nutshell… we all take something different from whatever we see, hear, read… that’s just how things are… 
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It was about all Croydon had going for it - decent record shops and the Cartoon (and the Greyhound, occasionally Fairfield halls too)
I have one of these and echo the comment of @Mark . I bought it in the UK along with a Cambridge Audio amp from Richer sounds and brought it over to France. It’s given stirling service and won’t break the bank. Yes, you can get cheaper on Amazon but I’d be wary about quality.
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I was thinking more about boxes of albums and CDs. I did rip them all to a hard disc but, by the time you setup a back up and redundancy system, I decided I’d just go with streaming. Using Tidal I get very good quality and, with judicious use of a VPN, also very cheap.
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The vinyl album our friends gave us had a great advance - a slip of paper inside the cover with a code for downloading it. Best of both worlds to me.
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It depends on the quality you’re looking for. You need a record deck, of course, including a cartridge; an analog-to-digital converter; and the software. The item linked above has all of that (I imagine they bundle software with it), though the quality of the files it produces may not be very high.
The advantage of making your own ripped copies is that you’re not reliant on a streaming service subscription to keep them, so the idea makes sense. (The same is true if you rip a copy of a CD, of course.)
Audacity had a bad reputation a while ago when it was bought. Many users considered the new owners were effectively installing spyware. There are plenty of alternatives if that worries you.
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Small world
Indeed, despite some appearances, the world isn’t that massive. 
I lived in South Norwood then, just a few miles away, but I’ve mentioned that before.
Yes streaming does most LPs but not all. I had a number which were of value and interest to me. Mostly produced by other than the likes of EMI and Parlaphone. The only way was to digitalise them myself. They were not available on streaming.
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Time to get my turntable out of retirement
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Yes, that would be high on my list of reasons to do the digitising myself.
The issue for me is that if I were going to do it myself I’d want to have decent turntable (possibly get the Manticore out of storage), good quality DAC etc.
Out of interest what were the LPs/tracks
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