Any suggestions on cassette to CD transfers?

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SRR

SRR

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Friends of the family want some of their cassettes transfered to CD, somehow I was suggested to do it. I am willing to do it, but I was kind'a wondering if there are some favorite free VST plugs that you guys use to get the job done. I would hate to just push dolby B noise reduction and crank out CDs with out atleast trying to make them sound fresh again. I don't have them in my hands yet so I don't know how bad they are, all that I know its some Johnny Cash tapes. If anyone has done this before let me know what you did. Yes I would say just buy the darn CDs already....but thats not what they want to do. Oh and as a added touch I thought of using those "vinyl" CDs I bet he would be pleased as punch with that desicion, but if they are no good, I will just use some tayo undens or however you spell that.
 
I used a programme called acoustica to transfer some LP's:

http://www.downloadjunction.com/product/store/1957/index.html

It was free for 30 days and then cost about $30, that may have changed as it was a year or so ago.

Had some useful little tools for removing noise and stuff, I'm guessing you don't want to splash out on Waves restoration ($1000! :eek: ).
 
Swiftsound Wavepad, I havn't used it on tape-CD conversion, but it's great for bad quality recordings and other little tweaks. Not a bad price tag either - it's free unless you wanna buy the Master's edition.
 
Lay off the Dolby and grab the recordings straight - even if they were recorded Dolby-encoded. Age and oxidation will likely have degraded the HF response on those tapes to the point where Dolby de-emphasis will act more like an unwanted low-pass filter.

Leave the Dolby off and take the hiss into the computer with you. From there use a noiseprint-style noise reduction plug (Waves, Sony, etc.) to remove the tape hiss. This will retain far more of your high frequency content than using Dolby B, C, or S will.

From there, just use your regular signal processing plugs to touch up the results s required. No different here than polishing a two mix. You may possibly find a lot of buildup in the 2.5kHz-5kHz range. If so, I recommend you try attacking it with a series of targeted notches in that range rather than a broad EQ scoop.

HTH,

G.
 
Well I have Cubase SX3 and Audacity and Reaper and a UAD-1, I was just looking for I guess that magical plugin that I should have known doesn't exist. And like I said I have yet to hear the tapes so they may not be as bad as I think they could be, of course they could be worse, much worse.

Oh and sorry the mac programs do me no good, PC here.
 
Sorry, I'm a moron. Bias SoundSoap is cross platform. I knew that, because I have Sonar, and Cakewalk is always trying to sell it to me, but just forgot because the other program is mac only.

I highly recommend it for a relatively cheap "audio cleaning" tool. I've been pretty happy with it the times I've used it. It's a neat little program.

It's $99 for SoundSoap 2, which can work as a plug-in or stand alone. SoundSoap Pro 1 on the other hand, is $599 and I think only works as a plug-in. Anyway, might be something to look into. You can purchase a downloadable version too.

A program like CD Spin Doctor is nice because it knows how to create tracks from each song on the cassette/record, so you don't end up with 1 long file. If you can find something like that for PC, it makes things a little easier.
 
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