It's Sunday today

And that's the day when I usually do a little informal tidying up in my little room to try to make the place look a little respectable. And so why, you wonder, is it looking like a total tip right now?

The answer is that I have sorted out the USB record turntable that I bought hundreds of years ago. It was sitting in its box for all of that time doing nothing in particular and as the summer, when I normally have loads of spare electricity, is slowly passing by, I reckoned that it was time to do something about it.

There was a box with "LPs" written on it clearly visible in the European Cardboard Box Mountain and so I brought that up here and unpacked it. And this is where the problems started as it was full of all kinds of other stuff too.

It took ages to figure out how it all worked. Nothing happened at all when I switched it on and there wasn't a manual with it either. I did all kinds of things, like surfing the web for a manual and changing all of the fuses and eventually hit on the solution. The reason why no notice light comes on when you switch on the power is because there isn't a notice light. And the means of starting up the turntable is to take the arm off the rest and move it across the album.

The sound doesn't come across in the USB cable either. There's a built-in cable with two RCA plug, and while I have an RCA lead with a stereo jack on one end, the RCA connectors are also plugs. And I don't have a plug-to-plug converter lead.

The program that comes with it - Audacity - is rubbish too. No automatic track-seeking, no automatic scratch and rumble filter. In other sords, all of the editing has to be done by hand, and that will take forever. Oooooh for a copy of Polderbits or something similar. When I had a copy of that for recording my tapes onto CD, you could hardly tell the fact that it was not an original CD. I'm going to be hard-pushed to do that with this program.