I’ve been collecting music for the last 30 years, but most of my collection is on vinyl, the best way to listen to music. The time has come, however, to transfer my collection to my computer. Is there any way to can digitise the music instead of buying it again?

It’s really amazing how much music we tend to collect over the years, whether it’s on cassette, vinyl or CD. I still have stacks of CD boxes lying around the house, even though I don’t listen to that music any more. It’s almost a pity you can’t return the CDs back when you don’t want to listen to them any more, and trade them for new music.

Anyway, back to the question at hand, how do you convert your vinyl records to a digital format? There are hardware solutions that can help, record players that can plug into your USB port and help you convert your music into MP3s. One such device is the Audio-Technica AT-LP120 USB Record Turntable that’s currently on sale at Buy.com for around $200. It includes a software package called Audicity which will let you create MP3s from the records that you play. It even includes a pre-amp that lets you connect it to your standard sound system.

Just keep in mind that you should be tagging and labelling your new MP3s are you create them; otherwise it’s easy to end up with a huge collection of music that you can’t find your way around. Better to take the hit up front.