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Note to laptop manufacturers: MORE AUDIO INPUTS. My laptop downloaded the driver for the iMic immediately on connection--plug and play. You would think they could have spent the extra 10 cents to equip a $600 laptop with a stereo input jack. The 44khz sample rate is often referred to as "cd quality"--good enough for me. I purchased the iMic for use with both Mac and pc laptops.
It also come with a short stereo mini-plug to RCA phono jack adapter which even features a "ground" screw for use with direct connection to a turntable--another feature I haven't tried. I use it with an analog mixer board, so have used only the "line" setting. It comes with Audacity--a very versatile freeware program for digitizing, editing and cleaning audio. The iMic has a little slider switch for choosing "line" or "mic" level. It is a bit flimsy, but with a little TLC, I expect it will last a while. Oddly enough, my Mac laptop is older than the Toshiba and it features a stereo audio in jack. Enter the iMic--the lowest-priced device I could find to get two channels of audio into my laptop. Set-up is even easier on a Mac.
After owning a Toshiba Satellite laptop for over a year and a half, I discovered that it only has a MONO mic input. There was a little bit of messing around with the sound settings in "control panel"; you can make the iMic the "default" audio input or just choose it from the list whenever you use it. The iMic is a very useful product to interface almost any audio to a usb input at a very reasonable price. and make at least one of them stereo. Very simple: It has one sample rate (44khz), so no messing around with multiple settings.
Coupled with Final Vinyl, and getting my old record collection digitized is a snap. For basic "just get the audio into the computer" needs, the iMic is a great little device.
(Just make sure everything is FULLY plugged in or you'll get terrible feedback on the line). This is a very useful tool and I would recommend it to anyone for non-professional audio capture. I was using the Griffin iMic to capture audio from a PS2 and at first had a really hard time filtering out the static and feedback from the line (the TV was also a bit old). However, after switching to a newer TV and fully securing the input line from the RCA jacks into the central hub, there was absolutely NO feedback and I got CD-quality capture.
Does what it says it does: allows you to input tapes and lps to your mac.
As a previous viewer mentioned, it's superior to Spin Doctor, the vinyl-to-digital conversion program included with Roxio's Toast. But the wave patterns are essentially useless for any sort of precise editing, and the capabilities for post-conversion filters, equalization, etc.
If your primary purpose is to convert vinyl to digital, programs like WireTap Studio, Sound Studio, and Final Vinyl are the better bet. are comparatively limited.
If you have a computer with audio in and out jacks, you don't need the USB interface. Spin Doctor is colorful, and occasionally it does quite well by automating the procedure of recognizing the separate tracks on an LP.
(If you use PC's, Cool Edit still leads the pack). What's disappointing is that Final Vinyl doesn't appear to be available as a separate program.
Roxio has made no significant improvements to the program through the last several editions of Toast.
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