> Does anyone know how to make 45 rpm records sound less scratchy?

Not a simple solution.  20 years ago, a hi-fi company called SAE made
a signal processor that was designed to take "pops and clicks" out of
the signal from a record.  It was not perfect but made a noticeable
improvement.  Minor pops and clicks were eliminated and major ones were
reduced in amplitude by a significant margin.  I still have mine, and
it is inserted into one of the "tape loops" of my preamp.

Probably today, effective solutions are similar but more sophisticated.
Although I have not researched the topic, there is a possibility that
there exists software that could run on a (high end?) PC that would
accept an analog input from your preamp, convert analog to digital (A
to D), and then run it though some signal processing and provide you
controls to try and reduce/remove pops, clicks, and other similar noise
as well as actively equalize out hiss (to a limited extent).  I know
that this technology is available in the recording industry at a
professional level, but is it available at a consumer level ?

My thought would be if you had such software, that ideally you would
want it to have the ability to produce a digitized output file (since
that is the format that it was "operated on" in the first place) in
the format from which you could burn a audio CD that would be playable
on conventional CD players.

Anyone know of any such software ?

Harvey Chao