The conversation about digitizing old vinyl was interesting. It lent some insight into the perceived state of the art, for one thing. For example, someone wished for a way to split album sides into tracks: that already exists, so I wonder how the perceived lack of that keeps people away from migrating their old LPs into more useful bits.
The back and forth about whether or not you could use a soundcard was puzzling as well: my experiments (once I figured out how to connect it all together) went just fine: I didn’t get any noise or internal crosstalk through the soundcard. It’s not like there’s a microphone in there.
Of course, the real upshot of this is a desire to get back into this myself: I still have lots of sides I need to convert. It’s just time-consuming and requires a bit more focus than ripping CDs: there’s the prep work of getting the media ready — cleaning and dust removal — then you need to listen to the process and make sure you don’t get any skips: clicks and pops can be cleaned up but skips can’t skips can’t skips can’t skips can’t skips can’t be helped.
On the 30,000 LP project, I’m not sure how it’s going to go: the guy who owns the vinyl isn’t the same guy who wants to digitize it and it’s not clear they’re on the same page. Watch this space for updates.