Greetings!

Glad everything is working with the drive!!!

As for ripping records, you will need to connect your stereo's outputs to your sound card's inputs. You cannot connect the phono directly to the sound card, because the signal levels do not match, and you will either get really low or really high / distorted results (I don't remember which).

Once you have your stereo hooked up, you will need to clean the records as best as possible. The less noise you have to start with, the better.

You will need to have some (good) audio editing software on your computer to capture, edit, clean and segment the audio stream into nice tracks. I personally use Sound Forge, but CoolEdit is another excellent choice.

Once you get the audio into your machine (likely as a wave file), you can encode as you normally would.

Note: I personally avoid doing this, unless it is something really rare. If it is something that exists on CD, it is sometimes more worth while (when you figure in your time and effort recording / cleaning / tracking) to get the CD. That is what I usually do, if I can.

Or, you can borrow it or download it. The licensing questions about getting a second hand disk to rip or download is one I will not address here, but since you have the original on vinyl, it gets a bit fuzzier with the fair use laws, etc.