old cassettes to digital

T

Teach

New member
Hope you guys have some good suggestions here. I have some old cassettes of my mom from about 30 years ago and several hundred from my dad (some more recent). My mom had a "verbal" correspondence with a friend and they mailed cassette tapes back and forth instead of letters. My dad was a pastor and all his sermons are on cassettes. Anyway, both of them passed away some time ago. My siblings and I have been discussing transferring everything to digitalj to preserve this part of our family history. That way one of us could buy the equipment to do it all and then burn CD's for all the others.

I know a lot of the cassettes will be in poor condition,with some better than others. But, what would be your suggestions in terms of hardware to buy to be able to make the transfer from cassette tapes to computer, and software to do some equalization or whatever to try to improve the sound in the process of doing all this?

Thanks in advance for any input!
 
I think it's software you're looking for, not hardware. For audio restoration, you want more than just EQ, you also want various kinds of noise reduction ability as well. But the softwares that do that kind of stuff aren't really cheap usually; at least I don't know of one that is. I use Cool Edit (now being sold as Adobe Audition), and lots of people use it for audio restoration.
 
A good tapedeck that can easily be cleaned and where you can adjust the azimuth without much problems would be a good start. IF you don't have one already. Only things needed further are a good soundcard (like a Mia or Audiophile) with line inputs and soft. You could do a lot worse than CEP. This is now called Adobe Audition. It can do all required: record, noise reduction, editing, EQ etc. Easy to learn also.
 
Thanks for the replies! I'll definitely check into the software. And, I'll definitely need to get a better tape deck than what I have...

Now, if I could just get my brothers and sister to go in with me on the cost of everything!
 
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