Cassette tapes to mp3

[elizilla]

For the past several days I have been working on converting cassette tapes to mp3s, using hardware I already owned. It's working amazingly well, though it is very slow.

I had found several sites on the internet with descriptions of how to convert from vinyl records, to CD. They describe hooking up a turntable to a mixer, and feeding the music from the mixer to the computer.

I don't have a mixer... no, wait a minute. The only purpose of the mixer in this equation, is to amplify the signal to a level that will work for the line-in on the computer. Isn't that one of the purposes of the device known as the tuner, it amplifies the signal to feed the speakers?

I have an old bookshelf stereo. It was a high quality unit, back in 1983 when it was new. I used to use this to record many tapes from albums, and later from CDs, and they all sounded pretty good in other stereos, back in the old days when we used to play tapes. One of its speakers recently blew, but I don't need speakers for this application. I simply connected the headphone jack, to the line-in on my soundcard. Then I used the volume control for the stereo headphones, to fine tune the level coming into the computer. Presto, a mixer.

I found that I have several packages already installed on my computer, that have the capability to capture the audio coming in through the sound card, and save it to .WAV files. And I have several applications that can convert .WAV files to CDs, or to mp3s. It's just a question of picking the one that is most convenient for my purposes.

It works great. The only money I've had to spend on this setup, was $3 for an adaptor to downsize from the headphone outlet on the stereo, to the mini-jack size patch cord that goes to my sound card. It seems to me that even if I didn't have the headphone jack, I could have connected from the speaker outputs, to the soundcard, using an RCA to mini-plug patch cord.

I've been converting the songs captured from the cassettes, onto CDs that can be played in car stereos, and when I can identify the songs, I'm also converting them to mp3 and putting them on the Omnifi server, so they can now be dialed up and played, or intermixed with tracks from CDs in my playlists.

They sound pretty good coming out of the Omnifi. The commercially produced tapes and the homemade tapes that were recorded well, and which are in good condition, sound very good after this process. The tapes that were recorded badly, or which are damaged, stretched, or worn out, don't sound any worse after the conversion than they sounded when played from the original tapes.

I've been feeding tapes to my computer all day while I'm working. Every 30 to 45 minutes another side finishes, and I either turn it over or drop in the next tape. I don't have the sound on, they're just dumping into the computer unheard and untouched. Tonight when I get off work I will look at the .WAV files, chop them up into tracks and delete the blank sections, and listen to little snippets of them and try to identify them.

By the end of the night last night, I was about a quarter of the way through the giant pile of cassette tapes. Next, it'll be time to do records.

Comments

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I pretty much figured that would work when someone else asked about this lately. I actually figured to use the record-out (that you would use as the input to the tape deck) as the input to the sound card, rather than the headphones out. In fact, coming from tape, you might not even need the receiver -- the playback output of the tape deck could be (should be?) directly useable. You would need the receiver for vinyl, though, as turntable's output levels are too low, I think, for the soundcard's line in.

[pi3832.livejournal.com]

turntable's output levels are too low,

Actually, the problem is that turntables don't have flat frequency-response curves. The "phonograph" input on receivers (a "tuner" just pulls in radio waves--a "receiver" combines a tuner, input selection, a pre-amp and an amplifier in one piece of equipment) equalizes the signal put out by the phonograph to make it linear.

This is why you can't hook a CD-player up to a phono input, or vise-versa.

If you need to hook up a phonograph to a non-phono input, Radio Shack sells little stand alone amp/equalizers to let you do that.

[elizilla]

Heh. This box has a set of RCA jacks for "phono" and a set for "aux". So it should be OK.

The jack for the headphones is actually on the tape deck side, but this is a bookshelf stereo so the tape deck and receiver are more closely tied than if I had all separate components.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Right, I forgot about the rebalancing it does, too.

(And, I know the tuner/receiver difference -- though on my stereo, I've got an integrated amp, rather than a tuner. Well, on one of them, the other has a tuner.)

[elizilla]

In any case, the central box that all the devices (speakers, tape deck, turntable, CD player) communicate through, can also talk to the computer, and it makes a perfectly adequate interpreter for my purposes.

[concordantnexus.livejournal.com]

Oooh!

maybe I can convince you to help me convert some special, old cassette tapes for us?

I have one of my deceased paternal grandfather reading something for us (we were in Iraq at the time and he died a couple of months after the recording) and some of my mum when she was young reading children's books for us in Polish that I would very much like to convert to Mp3 format!

[elizilla]

I would be happy to advise you as you set things up to convert them yourself. However I would not like to think of special irreplaceable cassette tapes getting shipped back and forth across the border. What if the men in black decide they don't like them, and they disappear?

digitizing music

[happyfunpaul.livejournal.com]

Tonight when I get off work I will look at the .WAV files, chop them up into tracks and delete the blank sections, and listen to little snippets of them and try to identify them.

Back in the late '90s, I digitized a bunch of cassettes and LPs. It was long enough ago that I don't have a clear recollection of my methods, but I do recall that the same software that digitized the audio input into WAV files also gave the option to automatically make cuts into separate WAV files whenever it detected silence. This method was not perfect, because even with the "cutoff level" adjusted as good as it could get, there would still be times when two or more songs would be combined in one WAV file, or when one song would be split across two or more WAV files. But fixing these mistakes manually took much less time than reading in each song separately. (I didn't even have the option of reading an album onto one long WAV file and then making separations, because my computer then did not have sufficient memory for that task.) So, you might see if you can do that.

Re: digitizing music

[elizilla]

The software I'm running lets me look at the .WAV files in visual format, play whatever section I want, and insert track breaks. For the commercially produced studio album tapes it is easy and fast. Live albums take longer since the crowd noise fills in those valleys. Tapes that are recordings of vinyl records don't drop to zero, but they often show a distinctive ticking pattern in the low spots that are track breaks, so I can find them pretty easily. Badly recorded tapes of random crap are hard to split into tracks; these take the longest time.

I'm only sending them to the Omnifi as mp3s, if I can identify them and cleanly split them. For the others, if they're mine I decide whether to keep them or pitch them. If they're not mine, I'm sticking track markers in them as best I can, putting them on CD, and stacking them up for Michael to do something with them later, if and when he chooses to.

[ericcoleman]

I bought a small Behringer mixer so I have a little more control on the input. I find that the output from my tape player can run too hot and I get distortion unless I take the input levels on my computer very low, then I get lousy sound.

I use Roxio, since it also has a good sound editor. The Normalize function works nicely too, gets rid of a lot of noise. I've done a ton of stuff that way.

Oh, I got the CDs you sent, but have had no time to listen to them as of yet. Did you like the RT stuff ???