[Glenn Richards]

wrote:

My middle-aged PC (Athlon 700 / 256Mb / 30 Gig) has no sound card and I
want to buy one. I also want to transfer some of my favourite vinyl to
CD. Can I do this with a basic soundcard + software or would I do
better to buy a more advanced soundcard maybe with its associated
software?

Sound card - pretty much anything if you just want to get pings and
chimes when you get new emails.

If you want higher quality go for a USB external sound card such as
Creative Extigy. This keeps sensitive audio circuits away from
electrically "noisy" PC hardware.

Vinyl to CD... there's several ways of doing this, but the best one is
to hook your turntable (via a phono pre-amp) to a standalone CD recorder
and record onto a rewritable audio CD. Then extract the recording using
EAC, cdparanoia etc and load it into the appropriate software to clean
it up.

The Wave editor that comes with the full version of Nero Burning ROM has
a very good noise reduction and declicker filter, and I've had very good
results from this when transferring vinyl using the method above.

--
Glenn Richards Tel: (01453) 845735
Squirrel Solutions http://www.squirrelsolutions.co.uk/

IT consultancy, hardware and software support, broadband installation