I was impressed with Walter Mossberg and Katherine Boehret’s comparison between the LP-to-CD Recorder Stereo System made by Teac America and the Ion iTTUSB Turntable that was published in today’s Wall Street Journal. According to the article, they decided to do this comparison in response to a steady stream of questions from baby boomers who want to convert tracks from their 45s and LPs to digital audio.
They preferred the TEAC LP-to-CD Recorder Stereo System (also known as the TEAC GF-350 Turntable / CD-Recorder) to the iTTUSB Turntable, which seems like an unusual choice at first glance. The TEAC GF-350 won’t rip tracks from records directly to MP3s, you first have to burn the tracks onto CD using the built-in CD burner. Their reason for making the recommendation is their impression that the Audacity software provided with the iTTUSB Turntable is not appropriate for non-technical users:
Audacity opened and worked — but only after we followed the manual’s exhausting instructions and got help from the company’s tech support. One step had us searching a list of confusing terms to select our computer’s sound card, a task that would rightfully baffle any mainstream user. We listened to tracks through our computer’s speakers as we copied music onto our computer.
But Audacity’s most glaring problem is its inability out of the box to convert your imported vinyl tracks into MP3s — the main purpose of the product. To do this, you must leave the software program, go to Audacity’s Web site, find the URL link for a third party’s Web site, download an MP3 conversion plug-in and run it within Audacity. The software never explicitly tells you how to do this.
The biggest issue that I have with their explanation of the Audacity software is that Mossberg and Boehert never point out that Audacity is an Open Source Software project. As such, Audacity will probably never provide an MP3 codec as part of the project, due to the patents that have been issued on the MP3 encoding scheme.
I think that the biggest issue with the Ion iTTUSB is Ion’s lack of focus on providing good PC software to date. There’s no reason I can think of that Ion couldn’t include clearer directions on the use of Audacity to produce MP3s. They could probably even include the MP3 plugin for Audacity on the CD they ship with the iTTUSB without violating Audacity’s GPL license.
Instead ION has apparently decided to say very little about software to drive the iTTUSB, other than the fact that it’s working on new software for a Spring 2007 launch. The Wall Street Journal says, “Next April, Ion Audio plans to introduce its own software program that will come bundled with the iTTUSB. Ion says this will have its own built-in MP3 conversion program, as well as the ability to automatically detect the start of new tracks.”
I agree with the conclusion of this comparison: anybody who want to rip old vinyl to MP3s at this point is better off using a two step process: convert the tracks from vinyl to CD using the Teac stereo unit, then rip the CDs to MP3s on a PC or Macintosh. I’m going to update past Operation Gadget articles that refer to the iTTUSB to reflect this recommendation.