For the past year I've been playing with some schemes to convert my vinyl records (many hundreds of them) to digital files. There are a variety of ways to proceed, but all of them are labor intensive when compared to current CD techniques. The labeling issue is difficult, but I've resigned myself to only doing a few LPs or 78s at a time, enjoying the music and labeling tracks at the same time.
Griffin makes a very nice usb <-> audio device for Macs called the iMic that is superior to the audio input on most Macs (many of the newer models don't have standard audio input). It is cheap ($35 list), works well and now Griffin is offering the beginnings of a very nice freeware tool targeted to vinyl conversion
http://www.griffintechnology.com/software/software_imic.html
It still doesn't have noise filters and a few other useful features, but the current version is very usable. What prevents me from doing this now is my wait for Apple to build aac into iTunes and the iPod. I can convert to aac now, but I'll wait a few more months before starting into the task.
An interesting note -- it is "interesting" locating phone cartridges these days. High end devices exist, but the medium end devices are very rare.
4:10:48 AM 
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