i have no 2 can you trade? have lots and lots of seeds. e-mail me roots n blues set.

This is an area I have a lot of experience with. To avoid boring others, I'll give you a condensed reply. Email me (click on my name) if you want more detail. I trod this path almost 10 years ago and concluded that for me it was a big (and unnecessary) time waste. I gave up and have bought CDs to "digitize" my music collection. My music is now mostly ripped into lossless FLAC files (a FLAC file is the audio equivalent of ZIP, it's just a condensed version that reconstitutes back to the original on playback, with identical bit for bit content as the CD itself) Some will understandably say that a CD signal is something less than a true quality analog source and I agree. As for MP3 or other lossy formats, I hear the difference and I can't listen to them. No analog conversion is needed to produce a lossless FLAC or ALAC copy of a CD, it's digital all the way. Quality DACs and ADCs cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars. Don't fool yourself into thinking that some mickey mouse device will produce or reconsitute a quality digital signal. It won't. I tried with a ~$100 external sound card, the results (from a capture of an analog source out of my stereo system) weren't acceptable to me. Most people would have said "that sounds exactly like the record" - it sounded good, but inferior to a CD because of the inferior electronic signal path. Most PCs with Win 7 and up (maybe too with Vista) intentionally lack the drivers to allow capture of the sound card. There's probably some workaround to allow recording of a sound stream with something like Audacity, but since I gave up digitizing my substantial record collection (many hundreds of albums) some time ago, I stopped thinking about it. For those rare occasions I want to record something and it's sound for which the quality doesn't matter to me, I have a couple of old XP machines I use. So my solution was to buy CDs and rip 'em to FLAC. I still have the records and tapes, I never play them. (edited for typo) This post was edited by snidely on Wed, Jan 15, 14 at 20:34

You might want to look at FreeCorder I have it as a hidden toolbar in Firefox.. I use it when I want to record "any sounds" the computer plays. Saves as 128bit mp3 by default. Do use custom install & choose carefully what you want installed as it has capabilities for doing other things too. Which you may or may not want. Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.freecorder.com/

Randy, When I saw the title of your post, I wondered if you can even still get CD recorders, however, you can get DVD recorders pretty cheap now. What about one of those? The only issues I can think of are 1) most need a video signal to record, they won't run without it (but you could experiment) - it could be anything, a feed from a camera or a cheap test pattern generator... The other issue is whether you'd have trouble ripping the audio from the dvd, although there's plenty of software out there to do it, much of it free for download....of course, you could also just digitise it in through your audio inputs, I seem to remember Windows have that provision somewhere.... You can get a DVD recorder for less than $200 and the quality's good, even better than CD depending on your options....and the recording duration can be quite lengthy depending on quality levels ( it affects video, not sure if audio's scaled back too) and if you get a dual-layer recorder, well even longer. Lots of these recorders work with rewritable disks, so there's a saving for you.