How I Preserve And Convert Old Music

As part of my home stereo system I have a Panasonic DVD recorder. It is connected to my digital cable set-top and my receiver. With this set up I can record DRM free videos from cable television (including the hip hop classics music channel) plus any audio I play through my receiver can also be recorded.

What that means is that with the DVD recorder I can record all of my vinyl and cassette tapes onto DVD. Once they are on DVD-R media I have used the wonderful MPEG Streamclip to extract the audio. Then I open the audio file in iTunes and correct the metadata.

I do it this way rather than capturing audio directly on my Mac so that I have a physical media copy of the audio files as a backup.

Macworld recently posted a way to get audio from a DVD by using Handbrake and VLC.

See: Rip audio tracks from your DVDs