- ION USB TURNTABLEPOWERED THRU COMPUTER
After reading the negatives here I was a little wary, but I went ahead and bought it because of the option to play 78s at a reasonable price (so I could digitize my grandparents' 60-year-old home-recorded 78 I've been carting around with me for years). I wanted to use Audacity (freeware) for mp3s instead of Ion's iTunes-related software, and after a few hours of chagrin and web searches I finally got it working right. If I were going for wholesale LP ripping I'd get a sturdier, more professional turntable with more features, but for my immediate purposes I'm happy with it ... now.
Here are a few hints I learned along the way using Audacity 1.2.6 on a Windows XP computer; adjust accordingly for your platform. The list looks long but it's really not that complicated:
Set the turntable on a very sturdy desk or table. Its light weight invites fluctuation so putting it on a flimsy stand only increases the chance of wobble. If the vinyl you're ripping is warped, weight it down under more albums and books for a few days to help flatten it out.
Before you connect the turntable, unplug any optional peripherals from the computer, such as external hard drives, using Safely Remove Hardware. (One of my big delays turned out to be a USB conflict, which didn't resolve until I rebooted my computer without the external hard drive connected.) On my setup it works best to record directly onto the computer's hard drive, then transfer the files to an external afterward.
With the computer turned on, plug the turntable into a USB port (not hub) and wait for the computer to find the right drivers or install them yourself.
On the Audio tab of the Sound and Audio Device Properties dialog, be sure the Sound Playback device is your computer's audio system, and the Sound Recording device is the turntable. While you're in there, open the Volume sliders for both recording and playback. You'll need them handy when you're adjusting the recording level and if you want to mute your playback while recording.
Don't start Audacity until after the turntable is ready to go. If Audacity is running before the turntable is plugged in, it won't recognize the turntable.
On the Audacity preferences menu Audio I/O tab, be sure the device settings are the same as in your Audio dialog. Choose 2 channels. Check the box for Software Playthrough so you can listen while recording.
On the Quality tab, set the sample rate at 44100 Hz.
Close all other open programs and don't use your computer for anything else while recording -nearby vibrations such as typing on the keyboard or even using the mouse on the same table as the turntable can cause unwanted sounds on the recording. It's the tradeoff for using an inexpensive, lightweight turntable.
After you've recorded the raw file, you can fix noisy, poppy audio with programs from the Effects menu such as Click Removal, Noise Removal and Fade Out. Noise Removal can introduce distortion in quieter parts of the recording, but I found that adding a little Bass Boost to the recording before judiciously applying Noise Removal helped decrease that distortion, and applying Fade Out to the last few seconds helped with the distortion at the end of the recording.
If your computer doesn't already have a LAME library to export your Audacity files to mp3 (it will tell you if it doesn't), just do a web search for lame_enc.dll, download it, and install it using the Find Library button on the File Formats tab.
(Yes, I'm an amateur audio geek with a mostly unused Broadcasting degree so I love playing with Audacity, but even if you're not, you can too with a little practice.)
For more info, read the Audacity Wiki entry about USB Turntables -that's where I got some of this.
Hope this helps.
P.S. After using my turntable for a while, I realized that it runs fast, so I double my recommendation to use Audacity if you care about making authentic rips. For my turntable, I use the Change Speed effect at -4.
Buy Ion PowerPlay LP USB-Powered Vinyl-to-MP3 Turntable Now
I received this as a Christmas present. My computer had no problem recognizing the hardware. I downloaded the software from the website, and no trouble installing that. What my turntable didn't do was...turn. At all. I contacted ION via the website and received no response. After two weeks, I tried again. Still no response. I opened the machine to see if maybe the belt had slipped off. This was terribly easy to do, considering the incredibly cheap materials the machine was made from. I couldn't believe this plastic and wire contraption was $50. The belt was firmly on the motor and drive. I suspect a faulty motor. But without ANY kind of response via the website to ION, I have no interest in purchasing ANY of their other products.I wonder why they bothered taping a "We want to help!" letter to the exterior of the packaging....
Read Best Reviews of Ion PowerPlay LP USB-Powered Vinyl-to-MP3 Turntable Here
I purchased this product as a gift for my hubby. Couldn't get the software that came with it to play through the computer speakers. After googling the problem i found that the turntable could record using audacity, a free download that i have already been using for a couple of years to cut my own ringtones. Worked perfectly! I deleted the ez vinyl software and itunes. Don't need'em. Love the turntable and have hours and hours of classic rock to convert. He's going to be very busy.Get audacity free at:
If you plan to convert to mp3 you will have to download a lame encoder.
Follow the directions here for a free lame encoder:Here's the link to good product manual to help with using audacity with a usb turntable:
It's not the manual for this turntable but the directions still work.
Want Ion PowerPlay LP USB-Powered Vinyl-to-MP3 Turntable Discount?
Basically, this is a piece of crap. The software is dreadful. The turntable is low quality. The idea of 'plug and play' leaves a lot to be desired.I tried for months to get my proper turntable and analog signals to record without feedback issues. I finally gave up and purchased this so the A/D conversion takes place in the turntable. But the needle and cartridge are cheaper than cheap so the dynamic range is terrible, the resulting sound quality dreadful. And the software was so bad, I took someone's hint to try Audacity instead.
Audacity did not make the Ion turntable any better, but it did give me the instructions and computer settings I needed to properly capture the analog signal from my real turntable. So now I am recording high quality, in full dynamic range, with background noise cancellation and click removal, by not using the Ion Turntable!
As for the Ion PowerPlay, I put it back in the box. It's so cheap, its not even worth sending back. But I feel I got my money's worth because my small investment ultimately did lead me to the right answer. It was worth $45 to figure out how to do it right (without the Ion).
I was perfect for me because I only had a few albums that I wanted to import.
I had a problem hearing the record as it played, but the ION website had an FAQ that showed me how to fix it.
The sofware had an option to automatically determine when a track ended, but that had problems sometimes when there was a quiet point in a track (it sometimes thought that the track ended too early), but the albums that I had were not professional quality.
There was an option to turn off that feature, so that I could click a button when a track ended, and that avoided the problem.
After it finished an album and sent it to iTunes, the songs in iTunes looked correct, but the underlying MP3 files had temp# file names and went into a temp directory (instead of directories for the artist and album name).
So I spent some time moving and renaming things.
Maybe I missed something, but by the time that I figured it out, I was almost done, so I never went back and tried again.
I really liked the end result, I could finally listen to those old tunes again!
It is not great quality.
Remember the little snaps and crackles when you played a record?
Now you can have them in your digital music.
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