Get Those Records, Tapes and CDs Onto Your Smartphone (Published 2019) (2024)

A huge amount of the world’s audio has been digitized, but many veterans of the Analog Age still have out-of-print albums, lectures and other content locked on vinyl records, cassettes and CDs. Converting the audio to digital formats for personal use is much simpler than it used to be, though, thanks in part to gadgets that connect to a computer’s USB port.

In addition to making files that play on your smartphone or media server, digitizing your analog audio creates an electronic archive you can store online for safekeeping. The steps for converting your old recordings vary on the formats and equipment you have, but here’s a general outline of the process and the equipment you may need.

Get Audio-Editing Software

No matter what type of analog media you’re converting, you need software to digitize it. Capturing the audio to a computer has been a common approach for decades, and free programs to do the job include Apple’s GarageBand for Mac and the open-source Audacity (for Windows, Mac and Linux), which has its own guide for converting records and tapes. Commercial software is also available, like Roxio’s $50 Easy LP to MP3 or the $40 Golden Records from NCH Software.

Choose a digital format for recording. Uncompressed or lossless formats like WAV, FLAC and AIFF preserve more of the original audio for higher-quality sound, but compressed formats like MP3 create smaller files.

Follow the software’s instructions for importing audio. After you capture the whole album, you can use the program to slice up the recording into individual tracks, label the songs, and clean up hiss, pops and other noise.