There are quite a few 2 track recording apps that record to mp3 on the fly...

either way ripping vinyl is a pain in the ass, but the "quickest" advice i can give is just to never stop the recorder. go back and forth between deck a and deck b on your mixer ripping tracks. basically keep your ripping and post processing sessions seperate (ie don't record one track; stop the recorder, then put the next record on then start it again).

especially for an ep or an lp of the same artist that works pretty fast. then in your recording editor, the idea is to make each track its own region in the file so it can later be broken apart--again the software should be able to break all those regions into seperate tracks. i use peak for the mac; i think sony's (formerly sonic foundry's) soundforge for windows can also do this.

Good tips. It likely would have taken me a crate and a half before I figured out to just keep recording and process my data later. I'll play with my Soundforge a bit tomorrow and figure out how to separate regions quickly.

I record the vinyl in 44k1/24 bit in one go, then chop up the tracks from the recording. Normalize them each seperate and then convert them in one go to MP3 320kbit/s with CDex (Open Source tool). I also burn the 24 bit recordings on CD as backup of my record collection.

this might be old fashioned, but I use a cd recorder and just record songs live.... then, I can rip the cds directly to mp3 and its done.... but I agree, its a painful day the day you decide you want to covert your record collection to mp3.... its endless

cant really see the point of recording vinyl in 24bit.

It gives you lots of headroom so you don't have to set your record level close to full scale. Records often have (loud) ticks (>12 dB) in them which you easily can remove in a wave editor. I normally record with about 18 dB headroom, so loose 3 bits. On 24 bit this is no problem but on 16 bit low volume sounds would get distorted.

fair enough.