We are receiving a lot of questions about transferring LP's to Compact Disc. Our answer: don't, not unless you have a good reason for doing it.
     And you might: you have priceless music on LP, and you want to hear it in your CD-equipped car or on your Discman. If you own a modern computer with a sound card and a CD-R burner, you already have what you need. Or almost all. You just need to add a little software.
     And also a physical hookup from your computer to your stereo system...difficult if they're on different floors. Chances are you'll need a very long interconnect cable. You could buy an expensive audiophile cable, but as we shall see there is little reason to go overboard.
     Of course, your computer needs an audio input. Modern Macintosh computers have one. If you have a PC and it doesn't, you'll need an audio card, such as one of the Sound Blasters.
     And now the software. The one we used on our Mac G4 is CDSpinDoctor, from Adaptec, which comes with version 4.0 of the company's excellent Toast CD-burning software (available on both PC's and Macs). This program handles the actual recording, allows editing, and even lets you assign the bands on an LP to individual CD tracks. Better than that, it does it for you...though you may want to check up on its choices, especially if the disc is a little noisy.
     Speaking of noise, CDSpinDoctor includes digital domain filters for removing ticks and pops, hum and hiss. More on this shortly.
     To check the software out, we recorded parts of two discs. One of them, by the folk-rock group Garolou, was chosen because the opening cut has a loud recurring tick due to a pressing flaw. The other was a slightly noisy copy of a direct-cut audiophile disc, I've Got the Music in Me (Sheffield LAB-2).
     Note that we recorded initially to hard disc, not to CD. To do this you'll need a good amount of hard disc space (a CD holds about 650 Mb), and it needs to be on a fast disc that isn't too fragmented, because you'll be working in "real time," with no chance for retakes.
     The procedure is straightforward enough. You set your computer's audio management software to open the line audio input on your sound card. The software may also have a setting marked something like "play input through output device," and you need to select it if you want to hear what you're doing.
     And what you may hear when you first connect all your gear together is a nasty buzz.