For a thorough treatment of everything you need to know, from connecting your audio system to your computer, to editing and burning CDs, I recommend reading Clive Delback's and/or Alan Reny's web pages. This page is confined to a few important things you need to know when archiving your records.
CD standard
As a reference, note that CDs use a sample size of 16 bits and a sample rate of 44.1kHz (44100 samples per second). This gives a theoretical dynamic range of about 80dB, and a theoretical maximum frequency of 22kHz, just adequate for the full range of human auditory perception. Nowadays , good players are available, making the standard CD perfectly acceptable to the majority of music listeners.
File formats
In order to use the audio restoration software on this site, you must first capture it as uncompressed sound files, 16 or 24 bit, in either AIFF or WAVE format. My applications will accept either mono or stereo files, with a sample rate up to 96 kHz. The minimum I would recommend in any case is CD quality. Capture at 24 bits rather than 16 bits makes subsequent processing much easier, since it may be made at a lower level, to avoid overloading and clipping. The level is then restored, using an audio editor, as the last step. If you want to do the restoration at a higher sample rate, 96kHz is a good choice. I do not recommend 48kHz if you intend to subsequently down-sample to 44.1kHz, although it is fine for other purposes.
Audio editors
Just as you need a text editing or word processing application to generate and edit text or word processing documents, so you need an audio editing application to generate and edit sound files. It need not be expensive. Personally, on Mac OS X, I use one of the two good shareware applications, Amadeus and Sound Studio. Suitable applications also come bundled with some CD/DVD burning software, such as Toast (for Mac) and Nero (for Windows). The list could go on indefinitely.
Internal formats
All audio editing and processing software uses its own internal format chosen by the developers for their purpose. This means that all software converts audio stored in a file from the file format to the internal format, when opening the file, and then converts it back to a file format when saving. The only exception occurs if the program has the choice to use its internal format as the file format (Cool Edit Pro did this for its 24 bit internal processing). The software on this site uses 25 bit internal processing, so as to incur no loss of resolution when processing 16 or 24 bit file formats.
Work flow
The work flow is not complicated, but it does involve several steps, which must be performed carefully if you wish to achieve the best results:
• Play the record, with the computer set up to record (capture) to an audio file.
• Declick the audio files next (instructions and reasons are given in the manual).
• Perform other noise reduction, as necessary.
• Use an audio editor to split the file into individual tracks/songs.
• Archive the tracks to the desired audio format.
Keep in mind that, with only a used record and domestic audio equipment, you cannot expect to duplicate the results of professional re-mastering of the original source material. Nevertheless, you may be surprised at the quality of some of the sample files to this site.