I still remember the mid-1980s day when my friend Chris strode into the office with his box of vinyl records, plunked it down onto a desk, and told us to take what we wanted. He was going CD.

It was a radical act that forever repositioned Chris in my estimation. How could anyone just throw away his musical past, even if CDs were more convenient? I'd never just jettison mine, I thought.

But the next time I moved, the turntable stayed in its box, and the records stayed next to it in the closet - for more than 15 years.

Within the past year, using the fruits of the digital revolution and the sort of time that only a single person has, I've been able to restore the vinyl music I've missed into my musical rotation. Here's how:

The first task is to get the analog signals into the computer. If your computer has a sound card with the sort of RCA inputs that exist on the back of your stereo, that's easy. For my "digital hub" iMac, I needed an analog-digital converter, which I purchased for less than $100 from Edirol (www.edirol.com).

Once my desktop digital highway was open, though, there was plenty left to do. To capture the sound as it streamed from my dusty turntable, I purchased Roxio's suite of audio programs (www.roxio.com) and powered up CD Spin Doctor. It records sound bites of up to several hours in the AIFF format.

When I had the music, the massaging began. At a minimum, that meant breaking the files into songs, a semi-tedious process. Spin Doctor's fever chart-like visual representation helps, but the function that's supposed to split the file into songs automatically doesn't. I found that I had to go from song to song manually.

Spin Doctor includes several filters for eliminating noises from scratchy albums. Learning to make a record sound a lot better was pretty simple, but attaining the "crystal clear CDs" Roxio promises required more patience and expertise than I had. Eventually I decided that a little bit of vinyl-era noise was, uh, nostalgic. Only once did I have to surrender an album as unredeemable.

Once I was satisfied with a set of files, it was a simple task to drag and drop them into iTunes, then convert them into (considerably smaller) MPEG files, and then add in all the descriptive data - such as artist name, song title, and genre - that imports automatically when you rip a CD.

OK, it wasn't simple at all. In fact, it was pretty laborious. About 100 albums - including two or three of Chris's giveaways - meant perhaps 700 or 800 songs, and each one needed to be recorded, rehabilitated, reformatted, and relabeled.

Though in the end, it required more time than I expected - not to mention about $200 - I couldn't have bought the recordings for that. In some cases, I couldn't have bought them at all. Some of them are obscure, such as the City Boy album that I stumbled upon in Minneapolis in 1977 and spent practically my last $5 on. Some of them are just really old, such as Vaughn Meader's classic 1962 comedy album "The First Family."

Now that they're recorded, of course, I can finally catch up to Chris and toss both turntable and vinyl, right? I would have thought so, but even though my recording studio has been all but shut down for several months, I've found it hard to let go. These things take time.