If there’s one searing memory that will live in my sweetheart’s brain until the day she dies, it’s the moment she realized I had sold all of her LPs to an enthusiastic buyer for a dime apiece at a yard sale many years ago. I often rationalized the loss by telling myself she didn’t have a turntable upon which to play those albums anyway — so what good were they?

No longer. Now I have to own up to my grievous blunder. ION has come out with its Audio LP Dock, a USB turntable that transfers your vinyl collection to your iPod.

The package also comes with software to let you record your records to CD or MP3. But the coolest aspect of this product is the fact that it includes something called Gracenote MusicID technology, which, according to the company, analyzes the record and retrieves album, artist and song information.

You simply play your record and record it with the conversion tool. At the end of each track, you click a button. When it’s finished, the song goes straight into iTunes. Of course, listening to your old tunes may send you down memory lane, making you forget to click that track button.

When you’re not moving music, you can just haul the turntable over to your sound system and play the albums through that.

Look, do me a favor. Don’t mention this one to my spouse, please? It’ll start the grieving process all over again, and, as the saying goes, when mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

Posted on June 24th, 2008 by dian