Converting my casette tapes to cd's and mp3's

[benali72]

I'm an ignoramous about computers and music.  But I had a bunch of old casette tapes and thought I needed to convert them to save them, so I learned a little bit.  I'm interested... anybody know more and have tips I should know about?

Here's what I did. String a cable connecting from the Earplug output of my casette tape player to the Line-in plug on the back of the computer.  Then I had to set the Line-in as the listening input on the computer through Ubuntu's Preferences.

They you install SOX and type:   rec -2   -r 44100   input_filename.wav
and press the PLAY button on your casette.

Once you've got a WAV file, you can clean it up with the Audacity program or convert it to other file formats (like MP3) through the FFMPEG program.

All programs were free and Linux.

Any other tips anyone's discovered? Thanks.

[The Gorn]

My general recommendation: think like an audiophile tuning up their 70s pride and joy, their tape deck with the logic seeking heads. 

The biggest single variable will be the quality of the playback mechanism and specifically the pickup heads.

Older tape technology could suffer from worn pickup heads, gunk such as iron oxide from the tape flaking off on the heads, etc. The net effect of worn or dirty tape heads upon playback is that higher frequencies are cut off or attenuated. So, dig up some head cleaner tape, and/or use a Q-tip with rubbing alcohol to clean the heads prior to making archival recordings.  Also, there is always the possibility of head misalignment. This will introduce higher frequency cutoff, and also may muffle the two stereo channels, or even cause the opposite side's audio to be heard during playback.

Another issue is the amount of wow in the tape player. That will depend upon the health of the rubber rollers and belts in the tape player mechanism. For this you want to use some rubber belt cleaner (I think you can find this in hi-fi shops, if you can find one that is.)

I think your setup connectivity is fine. We're talking about media that in its best days, using the tapes that Ella Fitzgerald recorded on that could shatter wine glasses in commercials, MAYBE could capture and play back up to 15 KHZ with fidelity.

This advice is given not knowing what is being dubbed to digital format. Obviously, voice recordings don't need as much care as recordings of music.

[DarkHumour]

I used to make complete overkill radio dubs to my computer and digital DAT tape. 

1) Use hi-fi VCR to record 4 hour radio show. (Nice use of timer option).
2) Dub song to DAT tape unedited.
3) Launch Cool Edit demo on computer with save function and normalization function chosen. (save and one other option).
4) Playback DAT audio through digital input MultiWav! ISA card into computer.
5) Slice off the intro / outro and normalize wave file.
6) Save back to DAT tape. Once full...
7) Dub to cassettes.

This was before CDRs were readily available. At some point I used a DAT master to dub to an audio CDR recorder/player at a college radio station studio.

(Clean up your gear, alcohol clean the heads, demag, etc)
Use line out on the cassette to line in on the computer and experiment with setting the input level.
Fire up your audio editing program and record it in real time.


There is probably a usb <--> rca input/output audio adapter.  Other than latency this might be a better option sonically as onboard computer audio circuits are noisy as hell.

DarkHumour

[benali72]

DH and Gorn, thanks for all the info. You guys know a lot more about this than I do, and I appreciate learning what you've done.