My recent post about Van Morrison's "Moondance" album brought several nice responses. One was from an old friend in Missouri with whom I hadn't conversed in a while. In his e-mail, he asked me to explain how I was converting some of my old vinyl record albums to digital files. Sounds like it's something he's interested in doing himself.

I'm happy to do so, because getting set up to do it was a lot easier than I thought.

Our story begins with a visit to Fry's Electronics down in Wilsonville, a big-box electronics palace that's so big I nearly pass out when I walk in. It's an odd place to shop, to say the least. The checkout stations and the customer service arrangement remind me of a gas station I used to hang around in in Newark, New Jersey in the late '60s. (Hey, they drink out of the Willamette down in Wilsonville, which could explain some things.) Trying to get someone on the phone at Fry's is a sick joke. But they've got the goods, and if you're willing to put yourself through a, shall we say, unique experience, you can come home with all the software and hardware you need for e-bliss.

I approached one of the younger salespeople in there one day and asked him what it would take to convert old analog music sources to digital files. His response was breathtakingly nonchalant: "Oh, yes, we have what you need. It's this Soundblaster unit. $39.99."

This thing is a small box that sits on top of my computer and connects to it by way of a cord that has RCA jacks on the Soundblaster side and a USB plug on the computer side. It's got another place for RCA stereo inputs, and you just connect your normal old-fashioned stereo source to it the way you would to an analog amplifier. The end result looks like this:

(Pardon the dust under there -- I'm overdue for a date with a dust rag in the home office. Too busy blogging.)

When I first got this baby hooked up, I connected an analog cassette recorder to it directly, and marveled as my computer was now "playing" tapes I had made in the '70s and '80s. The sound was just fine, and there did not appear to be any special software actually running as the sound passed through. The Soundblaster thingie seemed to have simply turned the computer into a part-time stereo amp.

To add to the excitement, I dredged out an analog-output DJ mixer that I had lying around, and hooked it up, so that now I could mix sounds going into the Soundblaster. But that's a frill that isn't necessary to convert your tracks.

Now to get to that process. A bunch of software came with the unit -- the most critical ones here being Creative MediaSource Player and Creative WaveStudio. To record something passing through the Soundblaster gizmo, you open up MediaSource Player; click the input to "line in"; tell it what kind of digital file you want coming out (for me, that's WAV); and click on the record button. At that point, what you're hearing through the computer speakers is what's being recorded. Here's what it looks like on the screen when it's recording:

When the song's over, I just click the stop button, and the program asks where I want to store the file (or whether to discard it). I save the file somewhere on the computer where I know I can find it -- Desktop works well. Now I've got a perfectly good WAV file, and if I click on it, Windows Media Player pops right up and plays the thing. Presto!

But what I get is a pretty low-volume version of the song. Rather than just turn the speakers up (which can be pretty jarring later if you forget to turn them back down), I use Creative WaveStudio to edit the WAV file. That's actually the most fun part of the whole process. You get to play recording engineer.

When you open up WaveStudio and open the newly created WAV file, it looks like this:

That, from left to right, is a graphic display of the sound file you just created. The red and blue are the two stereo channels. One of the "Task" functions available on the bar up at the top is "Volume," and you can play with that to increase or decrease the volume of all or any part of the file. If you highlight the whole file and increase the volume to, say, 200%, the revised file displays like this: