The vinyl versus CD debate has been going on since since CDs first became available to consumers in the early 80’s. We’ve had 20+ years to acclimate to the crystal clear sound of compact discs, but vinyl enthusiasts still long for recordings “the way they were meant to sound”; fuzz, pops and all. As someone who falls in the middle of these camps, I’m dying to see what my old records would sound like when converted to MP3 files. I appreciate the sound of vinyl, but just can’t be bothered to flip the record every 20 minutes each time I want to hear some tunes. In addition, sometimes it’s nice to let an album (or perhaps 5+ of them if you’ve got a multi-disc player) repeat several times while I’m busy working for hours at a time. Vinyl has several selling points, but convenience just isn’t one of them.

With the InstantMusic Vinyl & Cassette Ripper, you just hook it up to a turntable or cassette deck then plug it in into a USB port on your PC or Mac. The included software lets you to convert your music to MP3 files, or burn directly to CD. It also has an awesome feature that detects the gaps between songs to divide old LPs into individual MP3 files. Just a couple years ago I remember lamenting that products like this were really expensive and/or hard to find, but now Think Geek makes them available for a mere $50. Thank you, technology!

The only problem this doesn’t solve is the room that vinyl takes up. If you’re anything like me, even if you’ve got a digital copy of your records, it’s not like you’d even consider getting rid of the originals! At least you can listen to them anytime you get the hankering, and without all that fuss of flipping, flipping, flipping…

$49.99 Windows
$59.99 Mac

Taged as: electronics, gadgets, music, Think Geek, under $100, under $50, vintage

Posted by Lauren in Nerd, Gadgets