Growing up in the cassette and vinyl record age, I purchased many many records some of which cannot be found on any of the online services like iTunes, Rhapsody, etc.  so I got an ion turntable to help me in my vinyl conversion. It is pretty much plug and play, but I had several issues. First I was using this in a Windows 7 system, so that may have caused one of my problems which was audio input level. I just could not find a way to keep the level at 31, every time I would start a recording the level would jump to 100 and I would have to manually adjust it, which made the beginning of the first song record oddly. Next I had to fiddled with the weight on the back end of the arm to try and stop the skipping. What was happening is that about half way through the recording it would skip so badly I had to stop the recording. I kept adding weight to the needle, but that did not help. I even dug out my high end Techniques turntable and played the records to see if it was the records itself. After further testing I came to the conclusion that the arm of the ion turntable must be sticking somehow as it reached the half way point of the record. So I returned the ion to costco for a full refund. Seeing that I still had my Techniques turntable and a nice Dennon amp, I tried to record to the computer through the amp via the tape out. I was unsuccessful with recording to the computer this way. What I ended up doing is getting a movable magnetic pre amp from Phonopreamps. This works like a charm, the key I found was needing to remove the hum from the turntable, which I did by grounding the turntable properly. So I use RCA jacks from the turntable to the pre amp then an RCA to mini jack into the mic in on the computer. As for the software I am using Audacity, a free software from Sourceforge (a trusted place for free software without ad ware, etc.) With Audacity I record the entire side of the album then I highlight each of the songs and use the “save selection as MP3″ command. You can also do some tag editing with Audacity, but there are other software packages that do a better job. You will have to download LAME for Audacity, but the instructions are on the Audacity site and is easy to follow.