Program to copy old cassettes onto pc

Hello all,

Are there any free programs that will let me transfer my old cassette tapes onto the pc and convert them into cd or mp3? Any pitfalls I need to be aware of when attempting this?

Regards

 

If you have a sound card with RCA connections (those are the little Red and White connections like in the back of your TV or VCR) and if your stereo has RCA connections, you can run straight from your stereo into your PC, and use some sort of audio recording program to capture it.

We have a few things here at work. We have external sound capture devices, that basically act as a bridge between multiple audio inputs (mic, guitar, RCA, 1/4") and it is transfered via USB 2.0 into the computer. If you bought a piece of hardware like that, it would more than likely come with software. We have the Edirol UA-20 and the Roland UA-30.


That is really what you are looking at. Some older PC's have a tape deck you can get to load cassettes onto your PC, so if you were that die hard about it, you could appropriate one of those somewhere. I am sure there are more options out there.


Let me know if you need more help.



Ian

 

Those tape decks for older pcs are a different type of storage, thats a data type system like floppy discs. This is what your looking for http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/drives/7a8d/

 

I'm not saying this is the 'right' way of doing it, but I have, on a few occasions, done it by connecting a lead from the headphone socket on the tape player to the line in socket of the pc. I had to experiment with the volume control a bit but it did work. Then I captured it using Audacity, using the Stereo Mix input setting. The results were quite good. I've also done the same thing to capture audio recordings off a mini disc, and to copy old vinyl records onto the pc as well.

 

Thats a a good way I have used it but it does involve some tweaking to make it work.

 

Gotcha...you learn something new everyday. I had seen those multi-recording decks, where you can mass copy cassettes, and they looked nearly identical, so I always thought that the cassette drives were for plugging audio cassettes into a PC much like a CD drive, solely for listening to musica.


Ian

 

Audacity is a great free ware program for transferring audio cassettes to wav files and then burning them to cd's. I use it and have never encountered problems with it....Jim