Equipment needed:
- Turntable (obviously)
- A good cartridge that tracks well, and has been properly set up and aligned. If you care about sound quality at all, DJ cartridges simply will not do -- unless you're aiming for that rough, deep, dirty club sound. Likewise, $20 cartridges sold at Best Buy are pretty horrid. I use a Shure V15VxMR, which gives the cleanest sound and least distortion of any cartridge that I could afford. Cheaper but still decent cartridges would include the Audio-Technica AT440ML, Ortofon OM20 and 30 (not 10!), and Shure's M97.
- A preamp, to bring the turntable out up to regular line levels, and apply RIAA EQ. You cannot simply plug the turntable directly into the line in or mic jack on the sound card (well you can, but it will sound really tinny).
- Pro or semi-pro sound card. As in "not one made by Creative". I use an M-Audio 2496, but there are plenty of other decent ones out there.
- Software: I use Cool Edit Pro 2.1, to record the raw files, and then edit/declick/EQ (if needed)/denoise/normalize. CEP has a basic CD-burning app with it, but I prefer to use Nero.
Record as 16-bit WAV files at 44.1kHz sampling rate. This is what CDs are, so if you do anything else, you'll have to convert it to this before you can burn it to CDR.
This is all assuming you're running some version of Windows. If you've got a Mac, you can't install a better soundcard unless you've got a G4 tower (no PCI slots in the iMac/eMac). CEP does not exists for the Mac; I'm not sure what is equivalent to it.



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