Groovy" has been taken over by the current teenage generation, and vinyl albums are part of our illustrious past. So if you haven't yet done so, it's time to move your collection to digital formats that play from your hard drive, CD or iPod.

EZ Vinyl Converter makes it so easy, you'll wonder why you didn't do it years ago. Bundled with Ion Audio's turntables, this software package is meant for people who don't want to learn software, but it saves so much time that even computer-savvy professionals will love it.

Once you install it on your Windows XP or Vista computer and connect your turntable to your USB port, you're only a few clicks from having your favorite album on your disk. Simply open the software, click [Next], then start your turntable and click on the [Record] button. Every time a track ends, click the [Next Track] button. Once you've gone through the album, click [Next] again, at which time the software tries to match the song to an online catalog and place it in your iTunes library ready to play or sync to your iPod or other MP3 device.

When I first received the Ion turntable for review, I immediately dismissed EZ Vinyl Converter as yet another bloatware package to help sell hardware -- but I was convinced the first time I used it that this software was different. It's easy. It's intelligent. And it's stable.

The software takes advantage of the Gracenote music recognition service. As soon as you have finished recording an album, EZ Vinyl Converter connects to the Gracenote database, attempting to find the name of the song and artist -- and it does so with amazing accuracy. I started with my Beatles albums, because they're not yet in many of the music services. By analyzing the files that were recorded from the album, Gracenote was able to fill in The Beatles, the song titles and the album name -- although it did so by giving me several choices for both song and album, not all correct. But the correct one was highlighted.

On the first album I recorded, it failed to recognize only "She Loves You." So I can't blame the lack of recognition on the fact that I was recording an obscure tune. That was one of The Beatles' biggest early hits. Besides, it got the rest of the album right. Similarly, it was almost 100 percent accurate for dozens of albums from Bonnie Raitt, Van Morrison and dozens of other artists -- all genres and various obscurity levels.

EZ Vinyl Converter even recognized a bunch of tunes by the Chipmunks. Yet, it came up blank for The Chipmunks' version of "She Loves You," just as it did for The Beatles.

The best and worst news about EZ Vinyl Converter is that you must record the records in real time. That's good because you get to listen to all your favorite tunes as you record them, but it's bad, because it takes a long time. To convert 24 albums would take you about 36 hours. So if you have hundreds, expect to take a year or more to digitize your entire collection. And if you want to have each track identified properly on the mp3 file, you'll want to pay attention so you can click [Next Track] at the right time. I found myself ignoring the tracks just to get some of the albums in quickly. Later, I'll go back and edit them with Audacity, a free audio editor software.

Bottom line: EZ Vinyl Converter stands out as one of the best, most-useful consumer software packages I have ever reviewed.