When we first started The Sound-O-Mat, one of the services we decided to offer, because we'd be doing it so much ourselves, was media transfers: for example, taking a vinyl record and digitizing and burning it to a CDR. We've done a lot of transfers, from all sorts of formats, even Magnetic Recording Wire, which pre-dated audio cassettes by many years.
In recent years we've decided to give up the service. There's too many people willing to do it for far less money than is worth our time: a local guy will do an entire LP, including "cleanup" and copy it onto a CDR shaped like a vinyl record with the label for $15. We figure he's making about $5/hr before taxes, far less than Oregon's $8.15/hr minimum wage, but if people are willing to do it for that cheap, and other are willing to risk having their vinyl ruined and/or ending up with lousy results, so be it. We've still gotten 2-3 queries a month about transfers which we've dutifully sent estimates on, and the total number of transfer jobs we've done in the last two tax years has been zero.
Well, now there's systems out there that make it easy and affordable to do it themselves. If you have vinyl and want to digitize it so you can burn a CDR and/or turn the music into MP3s or WMAs (Windows Media files), well, here's an article written by one of us on what to buy and how to do it:
How to Copy Vinyl Records onto CDs. As always, we welcome feedback if you think we left anything out. And if you email us and ask about a media transfer and we don't email you back, now you know why!