While all ION Audio turntables originally came bundled with EZ Vinyl/Tape Converter, users on the newest operating systems may experience compatibility issues when attempting to convert their records with that program, which is now discontinued. For Mac users, GarageBand is a great, free alternative option to record the output from your ION Audio turntable, and this guide provides the complete steps for doing so.


TABLE OF CONTENTS


Setting the Turntable as the Audio Input:

  1. Connect your turntable to your computer via USB and power on.
  2. Open Garageband and navigate to Garageband>Preferences>Audio/Midi
  3. In the input dropdown menu, select the turntable. In some cases, it may be labelled as "USB Audio Device" or "USB Microphone," as is the case in the image below.



Creating and Recording the Track:


  1. In Garageband, navigate to Track>Create Track. Select "Audio Track" and, in the dropdown menu circled below, select inputs 1 & 2. This will allow the track to record in Stereo. If you prefer to record in Mono, select input 1.
  2. Once the track is created, click on it to arm for recording. Click the record button to begin recording; This is when the program will begin "listening" to the turntable.
  3. On your turntable, begin playback of your record. You may need to adjust the output volume setting on your turntable to reach the desired volume level. In this respect, trial and error is okay here!
  4. As the record begins to play back, you will see the waveform of the audio reflected in the GarageBand track that is currently recording.
  5. Allow the entire side of the record to play before stopping the recording in GarageBand. Editing the audio to cut individual songs will be discussed later in this guide.




Editing the Recording:


After you have finished recording the audio, you may desire to cut the recording into individual songs. The steps to do so are as follows:


  1. Click and drag the playhead (the marker that shows the current point in the track) to the desired split point.
  2. Use Command+T to split the clip at the playhead.
  3. Repeat until your recording is cut into individual songs.
  4. After all the songs have been individually cut, create a number of new audio tracks equal to the amount of songs your recording has been cut to using the steps demonstrated in "Creating and Recording the Track" above.
  5. Drag and drop each individual song to the start point of each new track, one per song



Saving and Exporting your Tracks:


Once the songs have been edited and moved to their respective audio tracks, you can begin saving the recordings as individual songs.

  1. To prevent all songs from playing simultaneously, be sure all tracks except for the song to be exported are muted.
  2. Navigate to Share>Export Song to Disk. This will begin the export process. The audio will export in MP3 format by default, but this can be changed via the format parameters in the image below. As well, enable "Export Cycle Area" as labelled below
  3. Repeat this process for all songs, assuring that the other tracks are all muted during export.