Second update: Appropriate tools are finally available for you to rip your vinyl without these kludgy methods. I'm currently using my turntables through Numark's DMX01 USB Mixer.

Update: The "Poor man" experiment was my first try at coming up with a process to rip vinyl. I've concluded that the poor man process produces rather large MP3s of decent quality, which is unacceptable to me. I am demoing shareware and low-cost commercial recorders/encoders that produce smaller file sizes with better sound reproduction and which allow editing. See Better Vinyl to MP3 Conversion (Mac OS X) for a review of alternative applications. Someone has also suggested using ProTools Free, but that only works for OS 9, unfortunately.

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In the past 6 months I have been freeing my time up from professional activities to focus on getting our family settled in our new Park Slope home and to allow myself more time to get back to some of the things I enjoy that have been neglected. One of these things is mixing music.

I was once a mobile DJ in high school and college and have long been a bedroom DJ. But personal and professional commitments pushed mixing music to the side for a long time. A few weeks ago, however, I found Traktor DJ Studio and wondered if I could find a way to play at mixing again. So I started planning to set up my turntables on my desk so I could experiment with low-cost methods of getting my vinyl onto my Mac as MP3S. Thanks to a bit of terminal insomnia, I got up this morning around 3am and burned my first two tracks. Here's my notes about the process.

Equipment

Hardware

• Apple Macintosh G4 QuickSilver 1.42Ghz DP with 120GB HD
• Cornea MP704 17" LCD monitor
• Mini Stereo (3.5MM) to Dual RCA Plugs
• Technics SL1200MK2 Direct Drive turntables
• Vestax Mixtick Pro Mixer
• Benwin flat panel speakers
• Headphones

Software

• CD Spin Doctor (comes with free Roxio Toast 5 Titanium ~ USD $89.95)
• iTunes 4 (free)

The process overview

Set up was fairly easy. I set up the turntables and mixer on the desk and ran RCA -> mini stereo cables from the Rec out on the mixer (or preamp if you don't have a mixer) to the audio input on the back of the mac. Then it's just a matter of recording your tracks to the Mac as .aiff and encoding the .aiff as .mp3. Recording and encoding tracks went like this:

Step 1. Record audio using CD Spin Doctor

1. Open "Applications > Roxio Toast Titanium > Roxio Music > CD Spin Doctor > CD Spin Doctor 1.5.1"
2. Cue track on turntable
3. Press red record button on CD Spin Doctor and play/release record and wait until the song finishes.
4. Press Stop button on CD Spin Doctor and stop turntable.
5. Optionally click the waveform-looking button to run any normalization filters in CD Spin Doctor to remove pops or boost volume.
6. Select "File > Save as" and save your .aiff track somewhere.

Step 3. Convert aiff to mp3 in iTunes

1. Open "Applications > iTunes".
2. In the Finder, open the folder where you saved your aiff file and move your windows around so you can see the folder and iTunes.
3. Drag your aiff file into iTunes.
4. Find your aiff file. Easiest way to do this that I know of is by being in Browse mode (click the Eye icon in the upper right). Select "Library" in the Source pane on the left. Select "All" in the artist pane at the top . Your track should be at the bottom of the list because it will have no Artist value.
5. With the track selected, select "Advanced > Convert Selection to MP3". iTunes will show a temporary playlist that reads "Converting Songs..." while it encodes your track.
6. Remove the original aiff file. Select the new track and click CMD-i to add Artist and Album information if you want. I also added Genre "Vinyl" to my tracks so I can find them quickly. I don't use Genre otherwise in iTunes.

Voila. You now have an mp3 of your vinyl. I found this very simple. I had done this a long time ago on my G3 using a shareware app like Peak LE or something (I don't recall the correct name of the app). This went much smoother because of the built-in MP3 encoding in iTunes and because of the speediness of my Mac. The main purpose of this experiment was to see if I could get away with ripping my vinyl without having to spend a lot of money on ProTools and other hardware. I really spent nothing to do this because I already had the hardware and Roxio Toast Titanium.

So I'm going to keep at it, ripping selected tracks from my collection so I can start playing with mixing on a computer using Traktor (see screenshot below of my first play session). If you know of any easier way to do this process with little investment, please tell me about it.

Read more in: "Better Vinyl to MP3 encoding".