I've got a baby on the way, not much cash and gave up a carear as a DJ in 2004. I spent four years working as awarm up DJ for big gigs, touring with bands and working my way round allnighters and all manner of shady partys.

As a result I have approx 500 albums plus boxes of 7inches and ten inches etc of assorted indie, rock, rare groove, Northern Soul and funk. I want to get tem onto MP3 before I reluctantly sell them as I love having them, but rarely listen to them whereas I'm surgically attched to my ipod.

What's the eastist way to do it, is there a free download that will enable me to leave a record playing out and then go back and chop it into songs? can anything divide it up automatically through identifying gaps in the records?

I've got a good turntable and no cash so idealy want freeware that'll let me plug in and go.

USB Turntable

Herein layeth the catch.

I don't have any money, that's why I'm selling the collection so I can't splash £70 on a USB turntable.

If you can get the output of your current decks to go into your laptop somehow, probably via a soundcard of some sort then all you need is this bit of free software:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

cool, I can get it all running in that's no problems.

Do yourself a favour and rip to FLAC, give you more flexibility in the future to transcode to other formats

Or just do what I am going to do and borrow your mates.

Cups hand to his mouth and hollors….

Anyone in Notts got a USB turntable that I can borrow?

Turntable into Amp, Amp Tape Out into Line in on PC run Audacity.
Get the LAME Mp3 encoder and away you go many happy hours sat in front of the Pc making Mp3 files.

Some cheaper ones here:

http://www.whybuynew.co.uk/index.html/act/shop/id/119/process/cat

You could probably fleabay them when you are done?

many happy tedious hours sat in front of the Pc making Mp3 files.

Be prepaid to spend hour upon hour upon hour upon day upon day upon week, etc getting very bored. Very slow process

Yeah, I was wandering (albeit nievely) if there was anything that I could use to put on side a – do the washing up, then put on side B and get a folder of files that just need naming.

I guess I could book a week of work and catch up on my box sets whilst I do it or just spend a week dancing through the alphabet from Abba to ZZ top. Hell it could be an STW drop in party.

You could try something like this: Vinyl to Digital but probably cost a fortune.

What records will you be selling btw, do you have a list? I maybe interested in the northern soul & funky stuff.

If you have a deck already, and a PC, you don't need turntables. For gods sake people, it's just audio – so long as the computer has a decent sound card capable of recording stereo at decent bitrates, and encode it to a lossless format (using audacity) you should have no extra purchase requirements or hardware needs.

Although it is very illegal.

I'll do a list in good time, most of the Northern is reissues from the warner vaults, but I've got loads of odds and ends. I bought to play them not as a purist looking for the white label in a matching sleave.

all manner of funk breaks, all the classics- Apatche, funky drummer etc as well as heaps of easy lsitening lounge type stuff- Rolling stones on the sitar anyone?

As cheesyfeet said – its going to be a long BORING job.
not as bad with LP's as it will be with singles.

Or simply download them from bitTorrent, Piratebay or even Itunes if you're really stuck

After the first few hours, you get really bored of splitting tracks from albums

What uplink said. What you are doing is illegal if you plan to sell the originals so you might as well just download them and save some time.

TBH I hadn't thought about it being illegal, I thought that was just when you swapped the files etc. I thought this was like copying an LP to a cassete so you could listen to it in the car.

I would be surprised if many of these were out there on mp3 as lots are ancient gems from american garage & soul vaults of long ago.

Still you do have a point, time for a rethink perhaps.

i have some griffin lead that converts the stereo plugs to USB, dunno how it works bought it for same reason but never got round to using it
Im in Derby so close by
email me if interested

Isn't it possible to get signed up to spotify and then download for free whatever CD music you have?. I have no experience of this, which might be apparent.