Converting a cassette tape to a CD on a Mac or PC?

Question

My uncle passed away a few years ago, and he was a musician... My family has all these cassette recordings that he did of himself and his band and I want to put them onto my computer and make them into CDs for the rest of my family. I was wondering if there was special software or a device to do that on a PC or I have a mac with garage band software, and i dont know about the quality ... but I could record the recordings through there right?

Answer 1

You can buy a cassette player to fit straight into your PC !! but they are expensive. You can do this yourself with a standard cassette player:
Put simply, you will need to connect your cassette player to your PC soundcard, then play the cassette whilst recording on your PC. A step-by-step guide is available at:
http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/diy
The recording software is the key, there are some free software downloads available at:
http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/downloads.php
I have used ‘Magix Audio Cleaning Lab’ and ‘Audacity’ – Audacity is particularly popular since it is free!
If you record to WAV format, expect file sizes of around 10MB per minute, or 1MB per minute for MP3 (at 128kbps).
Once you have your digital versions of the recording on your PC, simply burn them on to a CD (Nero burning software or similar..). If you use Magix Audio Cleaning, the software will burn an audio CD for you without needing additional software (assuming you have a CD writing drive of course!)
You can also download a free PDF version of the step-by–step guide from the download page mentioned above, the guide is complete with diagrams and screen-shots
Hope this helps

Answer 2

Yes, Its easy. You just need a cassette player, and a Audio cable (either a male/male head phone jack or a rca cable with a headphone jack on the other end). Plug the cable into the cassette player and the other end into the "sound in" of your computer. Use recording software (you can even use windows sound recording). Play your cassette and start recording (make sure you adjust your levels) and save you sound as a mp3 or wav file then burn it to CD. I use to do conversions for people old cassettes and old beta and video cassettes.

Answer 3

All you have to do is get a cassette player with outputs that you can plug into your sound card. Then you record it with recording software. It's fairly simple, unless you need to clean up the tapes. There are more detailed instructions at http://web.singnet.com.sg/~lion4/articles/diy/cassette.html and the software you use will depend upon your budget and the original tape quality.

Answer 4

attach a cable on d back LINE-IN port of ur CPU and d other end in d cassette player's line in port.....den start any good sound editing software like Sound Forge and den start playing ur cassette player now in Sound Forge enable recording with d source Line - In.......rememb. wen u save it, it will b saved in ".wav" format which is 10 times den a normal ".mp3" song, so by using good "wav to mp3 convertor" convert it into mp3 and Enjoy ur MUZIC ""_" ""_"
>