How to transfer old tape record sound to digital sound?

Question

I have some old sound tapes which has record of my daughter’s talk when she was a baby. I want to transfer it to digital signal, saved it to CD. How I do it?

Answer 1

You can record tape onto PC using musicmatch or audacity. Audacity is free.

1 Download and install audacity from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
2 Plug output of tape player into soundcard.using suitable lead.
3 Start audacity and press record (press the red button)
4 Play tape player.
5 When done, stop the recording in audacity
6 Save sound file: under FILE select wither export as MP3 or Export as wave (wave is better quality

You can edit the file, clean the sound, trim it before saving, but you can do this later: just open your WAVE file from audacity and edit it.

Here's the tricky bit: when recording, you may have different options of where to plug in the leads, this may take a bit of trial and error: you may either find that audacity is recording nothing or that the recording is poor quality because impedances don't match. (I listened to the recording as I recorded it and it was very poor quality, but upon playing the recorded sound later, it was fine, you you'll have to see which is best) I got much better quality from the "microphone in" than the "line in", even though it was a line input.

You can experiment with different tape player volumes and input volumes or with different tape players. It can take time, if you want good quality.

Also, make sure sounds are on: goto start, control panel then in "sounds and audio devices" click device in device volume and make sure the mutes are not selected and the volumes are high enough.

Answer 2

Any Card with a Audio in will work. Make sure that the out cable from the tape player will have a smaller plug/socket to the Card. And almost any record software such as the free ABSOLUTE recorder will be fine. Your problem will be in editing the sound files down a little, and to cleaning up the tape hiss and the crackle and pop. Roxio will do all of this. Surprisingly Roxio or I should say "Easy CD Creator 4" is the best and cheapest cleanup software, but ROXIO Suite 7 or 9 will be the best next option. You save this to wave, and then drag and drop into a new CD . You might want to segment any continuous sounds, since this will play better on discs. And you can forward to bits you like with ease. Once you get the Tape to wav recording, the editing using Roxio, or Maybe even Blaze Media Pro, will be a breeze

Answer 3

If you mean cassette tapes:
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