I am very grateful to Charles Paterson, a kind Oldie reader who uses an Apple mac, and who has contributed this helpful note:

Dear Webster

It is coincidental that Alice Pitman and yourself should have written about transferring music from vinyl to CDs in the same issue of the Oldie. I have been wanting to do this for years.I have some Charlie Kunz and  Temperance Seven records I would like to play in the car and when I am tractor driving when farming.These records are all mono, Charlie Kunz having retired before stereo had been invented.

I have an eMac running Mac OSX. I bought a thing called an iMic made by Griffin Technology. They say one needs a Griffin Turntable Connection Cable which provides a connection for the turntable grounding wire.I didn't discover this until I got it home and put it together. I connected the turntable grounding wire to the earth peg of a three pin plug and that works fine. One has to down load the soft ware from Griffins web site, it is called Final Vinyl. The help that comes with it is not as good as it might be. The FAQs from Griffins fills in some of the gaps.

I then import the tracks to iTunes and burn the cds from there. Final Vinyl makes huge files and they need to be compressed when importing to iTunes. This is done in iTunes preferences. Choose AIFF for importing.

I have done one cd's worth and am very satisfied with the result. My most serious mistake was to run 33rpm records at 45rpm.

I hope this might be of help for your Mac users.