getting old analogue music into MP3 format

AudioTechnica makes a basic turntable with built in pre-amp (you'll need one) that goes directly into your sound card.http://www.needledoctor.com/Audio-Technica-PL120-Turntable?sc=2&category=358
After that you'll need a cassette deck you can trust with your vintage tapes (buy a new one, it'll be worth it and not that expensive) You have several choices for audio software. I like Sony Sound Forge myself... has some basic LP clean up tools and can output a bazillion kinds of files. If you budget can allow it, the absolutly best audio cleaning software I've heard is DC6-Live from Diamont Cut About a $1000.00 but they have boil-downs for less money that do most of the functions (except the spectral noise reduction which is unbelievable!)
Good luck,
-Bill

guitar said:

that may be correct for old cd's but now the quality is much better and cd's use a much better sampling rate etc

Click to expand...

Standard Audio CD have always had only one sample rate - 44.1kHz /16 bit. Older ones may not sound as good as newer ones because of better mixing and mastering equipment, but unless you're talking about DVD-Audio or SACD, the sample rate is the same. BTW, I have some old 'direct-to-disc' CDs done by Shefield Labs that will put to shame nearly all new CDs in terms of sound quality. It's too bad SACD and DVD-Audio are doing so poorly in the market. "If you can't put it into an iPod, then I'm not interested".
BTW, I compared a couple songs a client friend downloaded from iTunes with my commercial CD release of the same songs... Wow, what a difference! The iTunes version was all compressed and tweaked. Sorry to rant... I've been cursed with wanting to hear really good audio for many years, but it gets harder and harder to find it.
-Bill