Does a decent job of converting your old albums

This unit isn't for everybody. If you are a SERIOUS audiophile, you will probably not find this unit up to your standards.

If you are a music buff with a huge collection of vinyl, and you simply want to convert it to mp3 files, this might just be the unit you are looking for.

I purchased my unit at Circuit City.

The unit must be assembled, and the instructions were fairly simple - just take it one step at a time. You need to put the turntable on the unit, add the tone arm, attach the stylus. The only part that the instructions were a bit iffy (for me) were those regarding the counterweight that goes on the end of the tone arm. Just take it slow, read the instructions thoroughly and be patient.

The audacity software that comes with the unit will run on both a Mac and PC. I actually have it installed on both and tested it on both.

On the Mac: The audacity software doesn't have as many features for the Macintosh as it does for the pc. The most obvious one I could find, is that once you record an album from vinyl to your computer, you need to separate out the tracks. On the pc side there is an option to do this automatically, on the Mac side, it's manual. (Note: it really wasn't that big of a deal for me, I was working with old noisy albums and when I tested it on the pc, it really wasn't doing a good job of finding the tracks anyway, due to the noise - it wasn't able to find the silences between tracks).

Once I recorded the music, separated out the tracks and converted it to wav files it was a breeze to move the files to itunes and onto my ipod.

On the PC - I haven't tested every aspect of the software (yet), but will say that the feature for detecting the silences between tracks, so that you can automatically identify the individual tracks works best on very clean albums - the cleaner you can get the album before you start the better.

On both systems: the one feature I LOVE is the noise removal. I have tried other software for noise removal without much luck. Audacity does a good job of removing pops, scratches and hisses. Not perfect but definately a HUGE improvement.

I will say, that personally, if I have the option of replacing an album with a cd, that it's the way I will go. I like this product, but it isn't a quick process if you want a good clean copy. You need to first record the album, then clean it up if there are pops and scratches, then separate out the tracks. It has been a life saver for me though, as I have a large collection of music I use for performances as an ethnic dancer, and my collection of records are old and obscure enough that I cannot find cd remasters of a lot of it. Without this product I'd be in a bad spot. So, for me it's been worth the time it's taken to convert the albums.

Some pluses: once done with using it for conversion there are rca cables. If you have a rack you can just plug this unit into your rack and just use it as a turntable.

Another plus: I discovered that I can take my cassette tape player, hook it into my computer (go to radio shack or some other place where they have audio cables, get a cable that will plug into the left and right rca ports on the back of the cassette player, and then plug into the microphone port on your mac or pc) and use the audacity software to convert my old cassette tapes as well.

Drawbacks: it IS time consuming if you need to clean up the recording.
There is also no dust cover on the turntable - I really wish they had supplied one.