Very muffled sound - basic help needed

[seville servant]

I was given a Sound Lab USB turntable by my kids so that I could convert all my old vinyl LPs into CDs or store them in i-Tunes but to be quite honest, I haven't a clue how to do this. My laptop uses Windows 7 and the version of Audacity that I downloaded is Audacity 1.3 Beta (Unicode). I have gone on to sites like Youtube for instructional videos but am still at a loss as to what to do. Some of the videos that I watched told me to go to Audacity Edit and Preferences to select things like my Recording Device but I have no idea what I should be setting it at. There are an awful lot of settings under Preferences but for the vast majority, I don't even understand what the words mean, never mind what setting I should choose.

By basic trial and error, I finally found a way to get a music track recorded but when I played it back, the sound was so muffled it would have been a complete waste of time copying it to a CD. I have now had the turntable for over a year and haven't managed to download one single track never mind a whole LP.

Is there anybody out there who can offer some basic advice as to whether I have the correct version of Audacity, if so - what settings should I have it on and are there any basic instructions that would let me copy my LPs? At this stage, I am not looking to do anything fancy with them - all I want to do is to put a record on the turntable, play it, record it exactly as it is on to my PC and then I can stick it on to a CD. Is it possible to find a nice, simple step-by-step guide that tells you how to get this thing to work properly? I should add that I am 62 years old and my knowledge of computers is at the VERY basic level. If anyone can offer any help/advice - which would be greatly appreciated not only by me but also by my wife who is fed up listening to me moaning about how I can't get it to work - would it be possible to get the advice in nice, simple, plain English with no computer jargon.

Thanking you all in anticipation.

[waxcylinder]

Use 1.3.12 (and look out for 1.3.13 when it comes out shortly)

See this set of tutorials in the 1.3/2.0 manual: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Tuto ... iscs_to_CD

and this one: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Samp ... gitization

WC