Hello. I am attempting to record music from vinyl onto my computer. When I record, it starts off incredibly distorted, and throughout the recording remains loud, choppy, and unusable.
When playing audio regularly and into actual headphones, audio is perfect.
Trying not to spend too much money, but it has to get done.
The output from the headphone socket is far too high to be fed into a microphone input. If I remember right from some previous posts, it’s about 100x too strong, hence the distortion etc. It would be much better to use some form of external sound card/DAC rather than the setup you described.
If you have a desktop/tower computer with a regular soundcard you can use line-in (blue).
Behringer makes some popular and relatively inexpensive USB audio interfaces with line inputs (UCA202, UCA222, and UFO202). Line inputs are compatible with line outputs or headphone outputs.
Do NOT buy a little “USB soundcard” because they are like laptops with only mic-in and headphone-out.
Or since your turntable has a built-in preamp you can bypass your amplifier and plug directly into the audio interface. But a headphone output always has volume control and that can sometimes be helpful with an interface like the UCA202, which doesn’t have a recording-level adjustment.
I have an ART USB Phono Plus ($100 USD) which has switchable line/phono inputs. (You don’t need a phono input because your turntable has a built-in preamp.)
Or there are lot’s of higher end audio interfaces with switchable pro mic (1) and line inputs (starting around $100 USD).
(1) Stage/studio mics are not interchangeable with “computer mics”.