How can you download audio cassettes onto compact discs on your computer?

Question

I have a lot of audio cassettes that I have recorded on my old boom box. Is there a way to get this material onto a CD through my computer?

Answer 1

You will need a cassette player (!), PC with a stereo input to soundcard, conversion software, CD writer. Yep that’s about it, oh yeah and a lot of time…..
Note: if you are using a laptop, you may need a USB external soundcard (mine has only a mono mic input – not good enough!) – you can get cheap, simple but effective ones (from Hong Kong) via ebay…
You could get someone to do it for you, friends of mine at: www.cassette2cd.co.uk for one. There are plenty to choose from out on the web, this type of job is perfect for a 'virtual' studio.
The software is probably the thing you really want to know about.. you will find loads out there. Personally I use Magix Audio Cleaning Lab – primarily for lifting vinyl, but will take any analogue signal. It has loads of features including cleaning filters, effects and editing… it’s cheap too and even comes with a stereo cable – try ebay. There are loads more, some even free downloads – listen to folks who have used the software then have a go….
Oh yeah, and Magix has automatic track recognition based on silence between tracks and auto-stop recording so you can go out for the day and it will stop at the end of your tape – really useful!! You will use up loads of hard-drive space, so don’t try this if you are pushed for space…You may need to purge the huge files every so often (10MB per minute WAV files, 1MB per minute MP3). You could save some space recording directly into MP3 at the sacrifice of a little sound quality.
One last thing, track recognintion works great for CDs in WAV format (for playing in a standard CD player), I don't think it applies to MP3s though as each MP3 file would need to be separated into individual tracks - This is how Magix software treats it anyhow.
Hope this helps

Answer 2

If you are not worried of quality, then fastest way would be to plugin ur audio player to microphone input on computer. Run some recording program that would allow u to record from microphone playback and save it to popular file format.

If u are worried of quality can afford some money, search for small studio that would help you convert ur audio cassettes to audio cd directly. They would offer u better quality, at reasonable price

Answer 3

Hi!

Your cassette player/recorder has a Jack connector for headphones... use a stereo cable with 2 jack connectors, plug the first into your player's headphones/ line-out connector, the other one into your sound card's line-in and use recording software, set it up to use the line-in as the signal source... and... be patient... it WILL take a WHILE... :)

Good luck!

PS It may be a good idea to do some experimenting, just to see what the volume should be, etc etc etc.