I have some audio cassette tapes that I would like to transfer to CD. My computer is a Dell Inspiron 9200, Pentium M 725 (1.60GHz) running Windows XP. I have an Edirol UA-1X audio-USB interface. I’m curious to know if any Dopers have done this sort of transfer, what software you used to record on the PC, what you did to control recording volume and quality, and what you had to do to make the songs into separate tracks on the CD, as opposed to a 45 minute track consisting of a bunch of songs. Thanks!
Audacity is what you need; it’s an open-source audio capture and editing program; after you’ve wired up your cassette recorder to the line in socket on your PC, you just set Audacity to record, press play on the tape player and go and have a cup of coffee.
When you come back, it will have captured the audio into an audio track, which you can then clean up, split, trim and export as separate wav or mp3 files, for burning to CD or whatever else you want.
Oops, meant to add that Audacity has controls to adjust the line in level and overall volume, as well as a whole bunch of useful filters and other stuff. It will do everything you want, and more.
If you can hook up a tape player output to your sound card input it’s not too hard.
I just used the normal windows sound recorder to record each song, using the volume control app to fix the input recording volume. Both are under All Programs->Accessories->Entertainment. I saved each as a WAV file and then burned to a CD with DeepBurner (free).
The only ‘trick’ is that the way the sound recorder works is that it will stop recording after 60 seconds when starting from scratch, but hitting record again it will continue. So I created a 10 minute file of silence (big enough to hold any of the songs I wanted to convert), and if I opened that and then started recording from the beginning it would overwrite it and allow up to 10 minutes non-stop. Once the song ended I’d trim the silence of the ends. Then I saved it as CD quality WAV file.
The only downside is that you have to sit and listen to each song.
There’s probably a better program to record with, but I don’t know of any.
It took a little experimenting to get the volume correct, but it sounded fine once I got it right.
There you go, probably much easier with Audacity than Sound Recorder. Heh.
There are several different programs out there that can help you; some will automatically split the input into tracks and clean them up for you. Here are some previous threads on the topic:
Transferring songs from cassette to computer
copying from cassette tape to CD using computer
Converting Cassettes to MP3’s
Thanks to Mangetout, c_goat and Thudlow Boink. Thudlow, I did a search, but obviously I gave up to soon. Again, thanks.