Converting old cassette tapes

[Andrew Everard]

Looks like it might well, but no experience of using it, whereas I have tried the one I mentioned above, and it works fine.

 

[The_Lhc]

Yeah that's got a line in, still 3.5mm though, be nice to find something with RCA inputs.

Oh e-buyer have got that for a tenner by the way, doesn't bode particularly well for the quality but hard to grumble if it's no good for that price...

 

[iMark]

For Mac users there is the Griffin iMic. It has a decent soundcard for recording old tapes.

http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/imic

I think it's available in any Apple store. It works with Windows too, but only XP.

 

[Tonya]

Hi all!

If you are serious about converting your cassette collection, I can recommend picking up a Philips DCC machine on eBay or similar.
I've converted hundreds of tapes as it actually has an excellent tape mechanism and outputs a pure digital output via a rear mounted coaxial cable.
It's actually quite amazing just how much info it manages to extract from those relics of yesteryear . . . .

 

[ultraminiature]

I have been converting my cassettes to a digital juke box using Terratec 6Fire USB. This is more flexible than the onboard audio input on the motherboard and has a lower background noise level and accepts MM phono input. Some computers are very good and an old Pentium II with a Soundblaster Live! is equally good and I have used that for converting compact cassettes. The same card in two other PCs (one even with the same motherboard) where too noisy and the low background noise could be head in the recording when played back. External USB sound cards avoid this.

http://www.mcmullon.com/reports/importing_audio_video/importing.htm

Cassettes may have material not available on LP or CD or elsewhere. I have a number of radio plays and live recordings which are still worth saving for the future. All analogue conversions are in real time and so it may be more cost effective to buy and download a lossless version of the album but if time 'free' and costs are high you already bought the album and creating a digital version need not cost very much at all. Even top line equipment can be obtained second hand at then sold at little or no loss a month or so later when the work has been completed.

I use Audacity (free) and Nero to save as wave and MP3 (320 or 192 for lower quality tape) and also then convert to AAC 128 for use on an MP3 player but not all MP3 devices will play AAC iTune files.

I use MP3Tag (free) to convert the wave file names to tags. iTunes truncates file names, but the original wave file name is in the title tag. I save this to filename first and then convert track, artist, title of the file name to the correct tag.