[Doug Freyburger]

Dieter Britz wrote:

I have a number of grammophone records, cassette tapes and minidisks that
I want to encode into mp3. I bought a cheap gadget from Amazon that did
the trick, but it stopped working, displaying "nil" on the little screen.
No one can tell me how to get past this - maybe it's broken. The manual
doesn't mention the condition. There is a similar one sold in Hong Kong
but I can't seem to buy it, living in Denmark.

What is the best way to do this, what good gadgets are available,
for converting, say, the sound out of a phone jack into an mp3 file?

There seems to be a lot of software for this, making use of the audio
input of a PC, but how good can that be? My attempts with Audio Grabber
were not very successful.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Sotware -

Audacity is freeware. I saw it was the recommended software for
volunteers on vibrivox.org to use with microphones and have used it for
more than that since. But so far I've only used it with USB devices.

Hardware -

We're now on our second box that reads cassettes and produces USB. I
think the first one still works but it's packed in some box in storage.
;^) The first one is the design of an old dual tape cassette deck with
a USB circuit added. It came with some crappy brute force software.
The second one is a small Walkman clone with a USB circuit. Tastes
great, less filling.