Cassette Tape to CD conversion

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Soundman

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I have a computer with a CD burner that can make CDs (data and audio). How can I convert some old cassette tapes (personal) to an audio CD? What kind of a sound card and software will I need? Is this possible at all? Thank you for any assistance in this subject.
 
soundman ,

you need to plug your line out from you cassette player into the line in of your computer.. the sound quality you achieve will depend on the quality of the input source ( your tape player ) , your sound card , and connecting cables...as far as software.. if you have windows the sound recorder program wont do , because of its 60 second recording limitation.. i dont know of any good shareware or freeware prgrams flying around , but i know n track will do the job nicely , and is only around 40 bucks.. hope this helps...

- eddie -
 
Eddie,

What is the name of the program and where can I buy it from? I appreciate you taking the time to answer my question. Again thank you for any additional information.
 
For this I use a freeware utility called cdwav. It does exactly what you want. It is basically a recorder, with the added functionality of splitting large WAV files into separate tracks in a correct way. This means that you can record whole tapes at once and cut them up later, which is very convenient. Just look for the file cdwav.zip on the web. It is a very small ~250kb file. Of course any editing programme (Soundforge, Wavelab) can do the same tricks, but they are not free and not focused on this specific task.

Rubicon
 
Rubicon,

Thank you for your information on this subject. I will look into it.
 
Rubicon,

Will I be able to play the CD in a regular CD stereo player? The reason I ask is because I don't really know the audio format for the audio CDs and I am recording the audio in the wav file format. Thanks for any additional information that you may have on this subject.
 
Soundman,

Yes, you can play your CDs on any player, as long as you use a CD writing programme such as Adaptec Easy CD Creator, Ahead's Nero, Feurio or whatever. Your .wav files will then automatically be converted to CD-audio files (.cda). You can also write .wav files to a CD, but then you are actually producing a data CD, and not an audio CD. The .wav files will not be converted and the CD will not play on a normal CD player. You can play the .wav files on your computer, though. The same goes basically for .mp3 files.

================

Now back to your question. You should always record to .wav files because this is the standard format for computer audio files. Step by step:

1)connect your tape recorder to the line in of your soundcard.

2)start your soundcard's mixer programme and select the correct recording source. If possible, mute the mic, modem, tv and other recording sources in the mixer programme. Now play a loud part of your tape and set the recording levels so that they touch on the red. This needs some experimenting but it is very important to get your input levels right. If they are too low, you get more noise than necessary and if they are too high the sound may be distorted ("clipping").

3)Wind back your tape and start cdwav.exe. Hit the playback button on your tape deck and the red button of cdwav. If you want, CDwav will now record one side of your tape as one huge .wav file. I recommend this if you have approx. 500MB harddisk space left.

4) When the recording is finished, use CDwav to split the huge .wav file into single tracks. You can also cut out silences or other unwanted passages. These are treated as tracks but can be left out of the playlist. Put all the tracks that you want on your CD in a CDwav playlist and save the tracks. CDwav will now produce single tracks. After this, you can delete the original huge .wav file
5) Using a CD writing programme, in "audio CD mode" put the tracks in the write order and write them to a CD. They will be automatically converted to the CD audio format.

Rubicon
 
Just a slight addition to the page. Apart from the recording and editing involved in tape transferrals you might want to clean up the "hiss" coming from the tape. I've found that Steinberg's "clean" software is fairly easy to use and has great flexibility (in terms of removing noise). All you really have to do is listen for the your desired sound. I hope this helps in your next step..
 
I had some old cassettes of some bands I was in years ago and wanted to put them on CD mainly to preserve them. I was worried about the shelf life of the cassettes themselves (CDs have a shelf life of 75-100 years). I started experimenting and here is one method that worked for me. I do have a Pro Audio program (Cakewalk) which is helpful if you are going to do a lot of this type of work. Since most of the tapes were recorded live many years ago, I ran them through my mixer and compressed them to smooth them out some and I also spiced them up with a little EQ. Then I normalized the audio so all of the tunes would come out the same volume. I even cut one chorus out of a tune that had a mistake in it, and pasted the same part from later on in the song that did not have the mistake. I guess you could say that is kind of cheating but I sure do enjoy listening to that part of the tune a lot more now. Since the tunes were all in mono, I used the effects in Cakewalk to put just a touch of stereo reverb on the entire song. Just enough to give somewhat of a stereo effect, but not enough to make it sound too wet. Then I converted the Cakewalk file to a wave file, stuck it on the CD and there you have it. My friends could not believe how good it sounded.
 
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