Record Cassetts to CD

[Emeric]

You need a few things:

- 1/8" stereo male cable that splits to 2 mono RCA phono plugs.
- Software to record with. (goldwave, cooledit, soundforge etc, demo's available of all of these, probably some free ones out there to. Do a yahoo search)

Plug the 2 RCA's into the output of your tape deck and the 1/8" male into the line in on your sound card. Using the software, hit record and when finished, save the file. This file should be a wav file, with the extension .wav. With your CD burning software, burn the CD-ROM as an audio disk.

How much you can store on your hard drive is all dependent on how big the drive is. For a 60 minute cassette at 44.1KHz, 16bit Stereo you would need around 600MB's of storage space.

[dcletteer]

Thank for the help Emeric, looks like you have gotten me started in the right direction.
Doug

[dcletteer]

I have some tape cassettes I would like to burn to a cd. Can anyone tell me what I need to do? Do I have to go from the tape player in to the sound card and make a file on the harddrive then burn. How long of a tape can I store? Thanks for any help.

[drstawl]

While I agree with Emeric almost 100% here I thought I'd nitpick about your storage requirements on the PC. Each CD can be packed with 650 MB of data (or more if your CD writing software supports it- mine doesn't; and you use the larger capacity CDRs) but the .wav files are slightly larger than the final size on the CDR. In addition you don't want to write CDs while your HD is so full that you've got less than 100MB free. This choice of 100MB as the "magic" number is dependent on your system. My only point is that performance may suffer enough to trash the CD write via a buffer underrun when the HD gets filled very near to its full capacity or is extremely fragmented. So my rule of thumb is to keep my drive filled to about 50% capacity and defragged and just take action before a burn to restore this empty space via backup to a data CDR. You gotta clean house sometime! To scale this rule to your system make sure you've got a 4GB drive that's less than half full at burn time.
Good coaster insurance.
Sure- I've burned CDs successfully on a 3GB drive almost packed to the hilt. But I paid for this sometimes with ruined media.