Digital Home Thoughts: Reviving Your Vinyl: A review of Instant Music from ADS Tech

Storing the Results
With the tracks marked and identified, the next step is to generate the digital output. My personal goal is to create a complete digital audio library of all my CDs and records collected over the years, so eventually I can load them all on a huge IPOD, or equivalent. Then, anyone in the family can select what they want to listen to, by whatever mood strikes them at the moment. For now, to support the greatest variety of players and avoid DRM completely, I've been recording mainly to MP3.


Figure 11: Selecting the output format for your digital recording. Note from the description beside the 'Folder' field that it can output to an MP3 player, but not to MP3 files???

Imagine my surprise when the only digital output options available from SpinItAgain where WAV, WMA, or OGG! The marketing material says that IM can produce an MP3 audio CD, so if it can do that, why can't I get straight MP3 output files?

Oh well, output to WMA it is then. It took about 2 to 3 minutes for SpinItAgain to output the 15 tracks to the normal album/folder + files format. Everything worked fine in Windows Media Player and other players I tried it with.

Conclusions
Most modern computers provide audio input jacks and built-in A/D conversion. There are other recording/sound editing solutions available, but if you're looking for a complete end-to-end package, InstantMusic + SpinItAgain isn't too bad. Once you get used to the sound editor and work with more 'normal' recordings, the process should go fairly smoothly and quickly. I would have preferred a 'Save for Processing Later' feature, and not having MP3 output is a major deficiency.

Don is an Associate Director with Fujitsu Consulting and leader of its Enterprise Mobility Community. With the number of albums to go through, it might just be cheaper to buy them online, heh?