[jodokast]

Basically my dad has some recordings on casette tapes and he wants to put them on the computer so he can burn them onto cds. Is this possible?

The output on the tape recorder is RCA......so I can't just jack it into hte mic port and record it huh? Will I need an adapter? Does anybody have any experience with this?


Thanks you so much!!

 

[Old Pa]

I use an Alesis Masterlink; my review of the unit is in the source forum here.

 

[jodokast]

Thanks Old Pa!!

 

[jodokast]

...anything more economically available though?


hm....besides rigging a microphone to the tape player that's plugged into my comp.

 

[waffenschmidt]

Can't you just run a set of RCA interconnects from the line out of the tape player and into something like this ?

I realize we're probably not talking about the best possible quality here, but hey, the price is right

.

 

[blessingx]

Cheap RCA to mini cord should work. It won't likely won't quite be proper level, but close enough. You may want to use some software to clean up the tracks after recording. Plus you'll need some base recording software to record the WAVs.

 

[davei]

OMG the Masterlink is WAAY overkill if you're anything short of a recording engineer (or tweako audiophile

) Go with the RCA to line-in port of your computer (you DO have a line in port, don't you?), it's good enough for rock 'n roll. If no line in port exists, use the mic port and reduce the mic level accordingly. Use appropriate software like Cool Edit (now Adobe Audition) or Soundforge (I think this got bought out by Sony recently and renamed... anyone?) to edit as necessary. You may need to boost the highs or use noise reduction to reduce tape hiss (I would use NR very very very sparingly though - too much and it can make your recording sound like a 96k MP3).

 

[sbulack]

I've digitized quite a few of my old cassette tapes for digital listening with ACCEPTABLE (nothing great - but the out-of-pocketbook-price is right) results.
1) The mini-mini (or RCA-mini) cable from cassette player to line-in jack of the sound card.
2) Preferrably the sound recorder that came with the sound card to record the sound played into the line-in. In the absence of that, under Windows there's Start-Accessories-Entertainment-Sound Recorder. This produces a .wav file.
3) The biggest pain is getting the start/end points right for each song on the tape. The easiest way to handle this is to digitize a whole side of a tape at a time and cut the songs out of it using a .wav file editor. In the absence of a .wave editor, you'll have to record the songs one at a time and manually start/stop the recorder at the right times to get each song with a good amount of lead time on either end.

I've very much enjoyed the digital files I've produced from my old cassette tapes (usually sitting in a corner collecting dust). Lots of good will toward your digitizing efforts.

 

[Mr.PD]

I did the same as sbulack.
Used the line in jack on a Creative sound blaster card. Used Creative's recorder and made wav files. Trimmed them up and made a CD. It wasn't much different than when I used to make cassettes from CDs. It was actually easier due to the ability to trim and edit wav files.

 

[Music Fanatic]

If you do this a lot, you may want to consider the TASCAM C222. It's a handy little device for exactly this purpose.

 

[Orpheus]

you'll want to hook up the tape outs to the "line" input of your soundcard as said before. then record using a 2-track recording program like Sound Forge:

before you start, ABSOLUTELY IMPORTANT: if using something like a soundblaster, make sure that all inputs other than the "line" input are muted! otherwise you'll get more noise than you should.

1. record at stereo 44.1khz/16bit
2. zero the clip meters on the software
3. do one pass with the tape running through the entire track watching the meters and the clip light. if the clip light goes on, then redo with a lower volume.
4. look for a couple db of headroom. if your meters are too close to 0db, restart with a lower volume.
5. now you're ready to record. hit the red record button on your software, and hit play on the tape. if after the recording is done and the clip lights went on, then redo.
6. normalize to 0db if not using compression. if your tape -> computer transfer has some random/erratic spikes, use compression--Sound Forge has compression built into its normalize function. i think it recommends normalizing to 10db with compression. i dunno... whatever it recommends is good.
7. it's done. save to the format of choice. i would save to non-compressed .wav as a backup, then save to .mp3 or whatever.

hope this helps.