|
If you pre-amp has a "phono in", you're golden. Look for a "line-in" jack on the sound card. It'll be an 1/8" female connector, tip-ring-sleeve for a three-way connection for stereo. Don't mistake a microphone input which will also be on the sound card.
Once you get something in - anything - there are a lot of programs out there that will "record" by taking that analog in and converting it to a WAV output file, on the fly, on demand.
I have not personally run it much but there is a shareware program called Soundprobe that looks almost exactly like the $500 program Sound Forge. With this program, you can record in the same format as CD, if you like - stereo, 44.1 khz, 16-bit. Or if you have disk space, you can go even higher in quality.
And then you can apply all kinds of pro audio things, if you like, such as removing pops and clicks and stuff. But the key is to find the beginning and the end of the sample so that the file contains only the bits you want.
(There are probably cheaper programs to do this sort of thing, and probably all kinds of $20 shareware programs that will do nearly as good a job.)
After you have the sampled song in WAV format you can then convert to whatever format you prefer, or just keep it in WAV format if you have a tremendous amount of disk space.
|