For a Geek who mainly lives in the Digital world of computers and the Internet, I have a quite interest in the Analog. While right now my photography is with a digital SLR that is mainly because I don’t have the room (or or the money) to set up a darkroom. I also have quite a collection of vinyl LP’s. I had started to convert them to digital on my old PC but the tools I had didn’t really make it easy.

It was quite the coincident that the issue of MacWorld that I picked up had an article on how to do convert analog recordings to digital. The software that they were using was Roxio’s Spin Doctor that comes with Toast which I was planing on buying anyway of CD/DVD burning so I picked that up at work. Now while the article talked about how to go about hooking up a turntable to the analog line in or using one of those cheap USB enabled turntables I had an better option available to me.

I had bought my turntable a couple years back and mainly use it hooked up to my dad’s old tube amp stereo system. The turntable is a Stanton STR-8 a good entry level DJ turntable with some nice features the one important to the project being a S/PDIF digital out, that’s right an Analog turntable with a digital output. Now the Mac does have a S/PDIF digital input so hooking the two together should be no problem right? Wrong. The Mac digital inputs and output are optical while the Stanton’s output is coaxial so enter this little box. The Cable To Go Coaxial to Optical Converter that I got from Amazon.

The Cable To Go Coaxial to Optical Converter

With that and the needed fiber optical cable everything was hooked up and ready to go. Beside have a direct digital source the other advantage of using the S/PDIF input is that you don’t have to mess with the level settings. Trying to get the levels set just right can be a bit of a pain with doing analog recording, too low and and it’s hard to hear the quite passages too high and you blow out the highs.

This is the end result.

So it’s set everything up and press record after about and hour everything is recorded and ready to be split into tracks. Now while Spin Doctor has an auto splitter it seems to have a problem with OS 10.5 and crashes a lot, so I just split the track manually. Then it’s burn the finished project to CD and save a version to iTunes.  At over an hour and half to do each LP this project it going to take a while.

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