Converting audio cassettes to CDs

[idli-vadai]

I have a few dozen audio tapes that I would like to convert to CDs. Any suggestions on the best way to do this? Is there a combo deck with tape and CD burning capabilities that I can buy? My tape deck died a few months ago and I'm stuck with these (nostalgic!) tapes.

[Desi_by_Nature]

Is there a combo deck with tape and CD burning capabilities that I can buy? [/quote]


That is one thing i'm not sure of. However about 6 yrs ago, I converted a lot of my audio tapes to CDs.

Here's my self-invented method:

1. Install an audio/MP3 recording software on your PC (there are a lot of free good ones - but you'll have to do some google research).
This software basically takes input from the mic port on your PC and converts the audio to MP3 (or other formats).

2. Get a dual audio/headphone jack cable - which has a jack at both ends (Microphone input and headphone output is the same jack - you know what i'm taking about). You can make this cable yourself too if you don't find it anywhere (i made it myself).

3. Get any audio tape player with headphone output. Plug in one end of the cable into the headphone output of the player and the other end into the mic input of your PC.

4. Rewind to the beginning of the song and pause it. On your PC, place mouse pointer on the "start recording". Press "play" on the player and click on "start recording" on your PC at the same time. The software will start converting the song to MP3. You will have to once again synchonize pressing "pause" on your player and "stop recording" on your software when the song finishes.

5. At this point you should be able to save your song as an MP3 (or any other format) on your PC. Then you need another software (lots of good free ones around) to burn your MP3 to a CD in the CD format.

If you want to burn the whole audio tape as such - you can make one huge MP3 file for side A and another for side B. Then burn them seperately on a single CD.

Hope this helps!

[DosaiLvr]

OP,

I'm currently doing this project - converting audiotapes to digital format to burn on CDs.

I'll post the method I'm following later in the day or tomorrow, feel free to remind me by posting in this thread if I forgot.

[HBHCHM]

I wanted to do the same, but found that I could download a lot of desi songs from cooltoad.com. Instead of converting, I downloaded the MP3 files of those songs and converted to AudioCD. That may be of better quality than converting the tapes....provided you find the songs on the website, which is FREE.

[MeMyself]

if you have about $100 to spare, you can buy a internal 3.5" drive that installs on your pc like a cd-rom drive - http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/audio/7a8d

(found it via google now, but had read about it earlier)

[DosaiLvr]

I would not bother converting pre-recorded cassettes (movie songs) etc. since MP3s, good quality CDs, youtube etc. are available for me to enjoy.

My need to convert a few Hi-Fi tapes to digital arises because my mother had sung and recorded many devotional songs/stotras on tapes. These are purely vocal w/ out acompaniment and recorded in mono, so loss of quality does not become an issue. The quality vocals in a mono track does not diminish drastically - hardly noticeable.

The conversion process has 3 steps -
1) Audio capture - Capture the audio from the tapes and store it on the computer in digital format

2) Editing/clean-up - If necessary. I use GoldWave - Audio Software which allows me to remove unwanted sounds, silence, tape hiss etc from the audio tape. Speed up a couple of songs which were very slow. Increase/decrease the vol of the song (songs were recorded at different times, even on different days and hence the input volume is not always constant). The s/w is very powerful and allows you to do quite a lot as far as editing goes.

Split the tape in to different tracks so that the CD you burn will not be just one long track!

3) CD burning - I haven't done this yet.

This is what I'm doing:

1) Playing back on a Sony boombox.
2) Connecting the 'headphones' of the boombox to the audio card 'in' using a audio cable (You can buy one at radioshack. This would be male-male cable)
3) I capture the audio and store it on my computer in .wav format using the built in s/w tool that came w/ my audio card. The .wav files are very big, btw.
4) I've stripped the 'raw audio feed' that I captured in to different tracks, "cleaned" them and am storing them in digital format.
5) Next, I'll be burning CDs and making copies.

Googling the keywords - audio, cassette, digital, conversion etc. will give you many results w/ touting many s/w, solns and tutorials.

Most editing s/w provide downloadable trial versions and refunds. I tried and soon tired of MS-Digital Media and returned it - all online.

Good luck w/ your project.

[idli-vadai]

Thanks for the suggestions. I went the old-fashioned route ...

Hooked up the output from a boombox to the inputs of a (borrowed) CD recorder and hit play/record. Worked like a charm (once I figured out that I needed an audio CD-R and not a generic CD-R) :)

[Gator92]

For about Rs. 20 a tape, you can get it converted to a CD in Bangalore, aaah the luxuries of living in India :)

[idli-vadai]

Good to know ... can you post details? Do they convert VHS -> DVD as well? My folks have some old audio/video tapes and it will be good to convert them to CD/DVD.

For about Rs. 20 a tape, you can get it converted to a CD in Bangalore, aaah the luxuries of living in India :)

[DosaiLvr]

Neat. This is luxury indeed.

Can you find out answer to idli-vadai's question on VHS-DVD
Also - would they convert NTSC VHS, tapes from my old camcorder and convert these to DVD??

How much?[/quote]

Follow the link to the thread in the quoted mesg for this and other post other posts on this topic...

It costs about Rs 125 per cassette if they supply the DVD+Rs and Rs 100 if you supply the DVD+Rs.[/quote]