Music can make your heart sing, it's the food of love, it lightens the very soul. But not if your poor old scratched and battered vinyl has more snap, crackle and pop than the Rice Krispie leprechauns themselves. If that's the case it's more likely to drive you to distraction and beyond, into, erm, even more distraction. And a distracted soul just ain't good (a quote from some erudite philosopher, we're sure).

Luckily, in these high tech days there's an affordable solution, namely the Magix Audio leaning Lab, which can be employed to tidy up the sound of your old vinyl. The program performs a number of other functions as well, which we'll come to shortly. Essentially, it's a music manipulation suite with three main menus - import, edit and export - which are used in that order. Unless you happen to working with a Frank Zappa album, in which case you can probably begin the exporting first, directly via the channels of your mind... man...