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Have you ever thought about transferring your old cassette tape and record collections to your computer? Just imagine being able to listen to your vinyl through the CD player in your car, or enjoying your old cassette tapes through the headphones of your laptop. It's actually a lot easier to do than you might think, and Surf is going to show you how!

• What you'll need. To get started, dig out your records and tapes from the basement, attic, closet, or the dark recesses under your bed where you've been hiding them. Shake off the dust, and, if necessary, give them a good cleaning (see panel at right for cleaning tips). You will also need a turntable or cassette player, a stereo amplifier or a mixer, and a computer with a line-in input built into the sound card. All new computers come with this feature, and chances are even your old clunker PC has one, too. You will also need stereo cables to connect it all together, so a trip to Radio Shack might be in order.

• Putting it together. Before you plug anything in to a power source, start connecting your components. The turntable and cassette player should have stereo output jacks built in; these should be plugged into the phono and line-in jacks of your amplifier, respectively. Be sure not to mix up the red and white lines of your equipment. Next, hook up your amplifier to your computer's sound card using a 1/8" adapter. There will be anywhere from one to three pairs of output jacks on the back of your amplifier — any one of them should work fine. The input on your sound card will have a little symbol next to it that looks like an arrow pointing toward sound waves— be sure to plug into the line-in jack, and not the mic or headphones connectors. Note: some higher-end sound cards come with standard stereo inputs built in; if your computer's does, then you don't need to buy a specialized cable to connect everything.

• Testing it all out. Once all your components are plugged in, test the sound. When you play a record or tape, you should hear the audio from your computer's speakers. If you don't, start looking for problems. Is the record or cassette player plugged into the amplifier correctly? Do you have the amplifier or mixer set on the right input? (If you are playing a record, the amplifier should be set on the same phono jack that the turntable is hooked up to, or the mixer should be switched to the same channel, with the cross fader and volume up.) Is the cable plugged into the right input on the sound card? If all your hardware is set up properly, and you still don't hear any music, check the sound settings on your computer. Double-click the volume icon on your taskbar (if you don't see one, go to your computer's control panel, click on sounds and multimedia, and check "show volume control on the taskbar.") Make sure the line-in volume is turned up and not set to mute.

• Start recording. You'll need to download some software to start recording your vinyl or cassette tracks to your computer. Several programs are available, and Surf tested out a few, including Media Digitalizer 2.1, PolderbitS 3.0, Rip Vinyl 3.04, LP Ripper 6.1, Audio Edit 3.4, and LP Recorder 5.0. Of the group, PolderbitS 3.0 came out as the crowd favorite, primarily because it is so easy to use, and because it allows you to record your media as either MP3s or .wav files. We were recording all our old disco and stoner rock within minutes after downloading!

One nice feature of most of these programs is that they can automatically divide your recording into individual tracks. (It's convenient not to have to make one giant MP3 or .wav file out of an entire side of a record.) Sometimes we needed to clarify where one track ended and another began (PolderbitS has a tendency to make one long track out of two or three songs sometimes), but this was fairly easy to do.

Written by Eva Talmadge

Do you use a different program to digitize your old records and tapes? Let us know how you do it!