Contrary to popular belief there are still plenty of us with a lot of music on vinyl or cassette tape.

Magix Audio Cleaning Lab 11 XXL is designed to record and convert these analogue sources to play on CD, PC or digital music player.

The box contains all you'll need, except for a record or cassette deck, and includes a phono pre-amp to raise the volume from a record deck's output to the line-in socket of a PC sound card.

The pre-amp supplied in the box is battery powered and has no controls, just a power switch. We used a Creative Audigy 2 for testing, a pretty standard card, and a direct drive Hitachi HT-350 record deck. Admittedly this is an old model, but of a vintage many people will still be using.

As expected, the volume level was low from this arrangement, barely high enough to get a satisfactory recording. The phono pre-amp is therefore essential for making such recordings.

Once the recording has been made, it's displayed as an oscilloscope-style trace in the top of the editing screen. You can choose to make automatic corrections for any sound problems, such as clicks, crackling and hissing, with just a single click, or spend more time tailoring the filters and effects manually.

Changes can be applied to an entire album, or individual tracks. Each of the manual effects has its own rack-mount-style control panel.

The automatic corrections do a pretty good job, with less of a reduction in the dynamic range of the music than in some similar products. It's not perfect, though, and if you have a badly scratched vinyl, you'll still hear the scratches, although less pronounced.

As well as making corrections, you can add audio effects, such as surround-sound channels for multi-speaker systems.

Along with the Audio Cleaning Lab itself, Magix provides Audio Manager 2006 and Photo Manager 2006 (presumably to help with photos for CD labels). It's good to have everything in the one place and the inclusion of a pre-amp, assuming it offers enough volume gain from your record deck, means you can start to convert your vinyl immediately.

Also consider
Roxio Easy Media Creator 8
While it's true that there are more powerful individual programs around, no other single piece of software offers the flexibility across audio, video, pictures and disc creation.
5/5
£60

All utility software reviews