Hi Phil, first of all welcome to the forums. Hope you enjoy your time here and find (at least) some of the answers you are looking for.
And you decided not to muck about getting a starter controller, but jumped right ahead to the front of the line with the SZ.
As far as digitizing your vinyl collection, take it from an old vinyl hand (38 yrs on the decks here), don’t!
Sure, convert the ones that are unique, but most of the stuff you will have (unless you were very eclectic) is available online, either because someone else already ripped it to digital or because it was released in digital too or because it featured on a compilation CD later on, lots of reasons.
Officially you have to buy music again if it’s on another “carrier”. I.e. if you had something on vinyl and wanted it on MP3, you’d have to buy it again. Imho this is the only place a little civil disobedience comes in. When you buy a track (and on vinyl that was a significant contribution) you pay for the right to listen to the track and in part for the material it comes on (vinyl costs money, productionwise). But if I then copy it, or get a copy from a “friend” (since internet times there are lots of “friends” of course) of the same track in MP3 or WAV or whatever format, it does not make sense to buy it again.
Clearly we don’t condone illegal downloading of music. Artists need to be respected = paid for the work they do. But paying them twice just because the music is no longer on vinyl but MP3, is a very grey area, thanks to archaic rules.
If you do want to rip vinyl, there are specific pieces of software that will automatically clean up your vinyl. But unless it’s pristine vinyl, which I am guessing most of it isn’t, don’t expect miracles. You can do a lot yourself, but that would involve going through every second of a recording and manually edit out the bad stuff.
For me a piece of vinyl would have to be super special to put in that kind of effort.
Just my thoughts as usual.
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