What would be the easiest way to record my books on tape so I can put them on cd?
I was thinking of getting a cassette player and taking the out put and putting it into my mic jack on my sound card. and hitting play and hoping to make it to the computer in time to hit record on my windows media sound recorder.
Would there be an easier way?
I used audio ripper software to convert to WAV files, edited the WAVs and then converted them to MP3. This may not be optimal from a quality standpoint (I don’t know whether it is or not) but it was convenient because I had some very good editing software for WAVs but not MP3s. I ran the cassette output to my sound card line-in. I started the conversion software before starting the cassette and later trimmed the leading silence out of the WAV files. I also edited the WAVs to split into the tracks I wanted. My ripper software has a setting for a duration of silence that triggers a new track, and this automatically split files for most music tapes but not for all of them and it erroneously split some songs that had breaks in the middle, which is the main reason I wanted the ability to edit the files. If you’re converting speech instead of music, you probably want to turn automatic track breaks off and then manually break up the file into separate tracks.
Note that I was converting tapes for which I either owned the copyright or for which I had permission to copy, so there were no legal issues with that. I’m not sure whether you legally have the right to rip digital copies of things you don’t own copyright for even if it’s just personal use. I’m not getting into that.
Use these to record your audio and convert to mp3.
Use the line out of your cassette player and the line-in on the sound card of your PC.
I would tend to try audacity first. The other is a trial version that expires after fifteen days.
Do be careful when downloading audacity. There is mention of a version with a serious bug. Make sure to get the newest version.
Oops. Almost forgot. Make sure to get and install the LAME libraries as well. You’ll need them to encode mp3 files. They are available at the same download place as the audacity file itself.
I’ve been wanting to do something like this with the old VHSs of my high school plays (never has a better “Little Bird, Little Bird” been sung).
How would I do this under OS X? Or OS 9.x? (It’s an iMac.)
Troy: There are Video capture devices that you connect to a USB port (or FireWire, if your iMac is new enough to have one) that work with Macs. I assume (I’ve never used one of those) that they come with capture programs.
Troy I use Polderbits to convert vinyl to CD. It’s trialware and only cost $10 or $20 to license. It works great and comes with an editor/splitter. I built a small amp to go between the turntable and sound card, since turntable signals are so weak.
I tried to use the same setup to pull a song off a video tape (my daughter had to learn it for dance) and it wouldn’t work. The sound was jerky and falling out in places. I tried it with and without the amp, and also tried the Windows Sound Recorder, but never got it to work properly. Seemed like the recorder couldn’t “keep up” with the input signal. Don’t know if different software (more buffering?) or different amp would have worked. (BTW on a PC not a Mac. You may have better luck.)
Sorry, duke for the hijack.
oh its completely all right I am interested in video capture, I went and but one of those snappy 5.0 thingys but never could get it to work.
They’re trying to figure it out, too.
I’m not so much interested in capturing the video, I really just want the audio, since that will remain cheap-to-free. And, upon re-reading my previous post, there’s no way any of you could’ve known that.:smack:
oK the audacity thingy is working for me I just did the whole patchy thing (wow I sound like, like a valley girl, tottally rad!) and so far its working out A O K!