Back in March I posted a description of how I do this. At the end of that post I mentioned that I planned to try a program called Golden Records which is supposed to make the process simpler, and promised to report on it. Here's the report, finally.

Verdict: it works fine and makes the process pretty straightforward. But it's a little too straightforward for me--I want more tweakability. As far as I could tell it doesn't allow you to make adjustments to the click/pop/scratch reduction parameters, and I found that it didn't do the job as well as my combination of CoolEdit 2000 (now Adobe Audition) and ClickFix Lite. I tried it with a very beat-up LP--the copy of ZZ Top's Tres Hombres that was a recent Music of the Week--and there was a very noticeable difference. (My wife mocks me for caring about this, and thinks I'm some sort of obsessive audiophile, which only proves that she's never known a real one.)

So if you want something that will do the job pretty quickly and simply, and you either have LPs that aren't in real bad shape or aren't that concerned about eliminating noise, Golden Records would be a good choice.

The program also has some cassette-specific capabilities, which I had planned to try out, as I also have a fair number of old cassettes. Handling the various Dolby schemes can be a problem when digitizing cassettes, and I was hoping GR would help me out with that. But I carelessly let the 30-day trial period expire and didn't get to evaluate that functionality.