I need some 'sound" help. When my mother downsized her household, we found an old cassette tape of a studio recording made in the late 70’s. It was an audition tape of me singing and playing guitar. I sucked, but that’s beside the point. Is there any way that anyone knows of to transfer a cassette tape to a CD? At home, I mean, not through a commercial vendor.
I have a version of Nero with an elementary ripping program that works with Windows.
My son has a Mac and apparently there’s an excellent software program already bundled in.
Depends on your computer hardware (soundcard specifically). If your soundcard has an audio in jack then simply plug the audio-out of a tape recorder to the audio-in on your soundcard. Just play the tape and have software on the PC record what is coming in. It will be no faster than the tape plays but I doubt there is any way around that. If you have 5 hours of recordings it will take 5 hours to re-record.
Here is a free audio recording software package that will do the trick for this as well: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
You need a patch cord that is two RCA plugs at one end and one 1/8" stereo mini-plug at the other; and a cassette deck. And a sound recording program on your computer. Windows Recorder will not do the job - it records in very small increments of time for some reason.
Plug the two RCA plugs into the output jacks on the back of the tape deck, and the 1/8" plug into the LINE input on your sound card. Do not, under any circumstances, plug it into the MIC input, this is the WRONG HOLE. Open Windows Mixer (the speaker icon in your systray) or go to Start | Run | and enter: sndvol32.exe - then select Properties and Recording. A series of faders will appear, each with a check box underneath. Check the one that says LINE and slide the fader up a little over halfway. Go back to Properties, and select Playback. Check the box under Line. Close the mixer.
Play the tape, and you should hear it coming out of the computer speakers. This has to work first before you can go any further. Open the recording program, start a new waveform (File | New), select Stereo, 44.1 KHz, 16-bit. Hit record, and play the tape. When the tape is done, stop the recording program. Give the file a name and save it as <my filename>.wav.
That may be a bit much to digest right off the bat, so let me know when you get this far, and we’ll take it up from there.
Oh yeah…once on your PC then record to CD if you have a CD burner. The software I linked above will rip your recording for you.
Here’s a hack to increase the maximum recording time in Sound Recorder:
Make sure your microphone is muted so it will not pick up sound.
Click Record, and then let Sound Recorder run for 60 seconds (recording silence).
After Sound Recorder stops recording, click Save As on the File menu, and name the file Blank.wav.
To increase the maximum recording time in Sound Recorder, click Insert File on the Edit menu, and then insert the Blank.wav file that you saved in step 3. When you do this, the maximum recording time is increased by 60 seconds. You can repeat this step once for each additional minute of recording time that you want to add. For example, for a 5-minute recording time, insert the Blank.wav file five times. This works up to to 999 seconds, or 15:39, if my math skills are still intact.
To get audio off a cassette tape into a computer, you could buy a cassette drive for your PC. 
I have hundreds of old cassette tapes at home, and I’m thinking of getting one of these drives to aid in converting them to MP3s…
You’re a minute short; it’s 16:39.
I’m intrigued by this idea. Is there anything you can do to compensate for a tape’s decrease in sound quality?
I just did this the other day with my MP3 player. It has a line in jack and a recorder feature. I just plugged the headphone jack on my tape player into the line in jack on my MP3 player, hit “record” on the MP3 player and “play” on the tape player, and let it go.
If I’d wanted to, at that point, I could have transferred the MP3 player to my computer and burned it onto CD.
Not really. The one thing you ought to do before you transfer a tape is adjust the playback head’s azimuth to match that of the tape. This is a problem, though, because once you adjust it off of where it’s set now, it will be out of alignment for all the tapes recorded on that machine. Cassette head alignment is notoriously poor, and varies from deck to deck. Playing back a tape on a deck on which it was not recorded is pretty much guaranteed to introduce phase cancellations and other nasty anomalies of wandering azimuth. It blurs the stereo image. It makes one channel brighter and the other duller. And motor speed is the bane of the existence of cassettes. Get any five cassette decks together, and most likely none of them will run at exactly the same speed. Two may be close, but no cigar.
If you would like to know how to adjust the azimuth for any given tape, and you have a deck on which you don’t care if the head position gets moved, feel free to ask, or send me an e-mail. I’ve been doing it for years. It comes in real handy if you want to preserve irreplaceable recordings in the best possible way.
Some audio software will let you futz with the recording once it is on the computer. Technically you can never get better than the original recording (you cannot put information in that isn’t already there…only play with what you have) but some clean-up can be done to reduce hiss or pops or get rid of extraneous noises. That said there is an art to this and it takes no small amount of skill to do a good job of it. That said if you want to try there are several software packages that will help do it and as long as you keep a copy of the original to go back to you can play with the recording to your heart’s content.
I suppose you could play with the tracks a bit too that fishbicycle was on about to balance them for poor head azimuth but that would actually mean reducing the quality of the good track to match the duller track. Not sure if it is better to have two matched, dull tracks or one bright and one dull track but another thing you could play with and see (although I suspect these recordings in the OP are mono).
No, it does not mean trading one kind of bad quality for another when you adjust the azimuth. When it is centered, both channels have the same apparent brightness. This will be exactly what the tape is supposed to sound like. Once adjusted, you can get the best transfer possible. If it’s the last time you’re going to play that tape and you have otherwise retired your tape deck, it’s worth it to adjust the head for accurate reproduction.
If your tape has Dobly B or C on it, you have to use it on playback, but there is no guarantee that it will operate correctly due to different record/playback levels. You can also use FFT noise reduction to remove the sound of the tape, but this is highly specialized work and your software needs to be using the proper parameters, or it sounds terrible.
Sorry if I was unclear.
I did not mean that adjusting the azimuth would screwup quality (presuming you adjusted correctly) but rather adjusting the computer recording after the fact if you had not adjusted the azimuth and got a bright and dim track.
Sorry, this part is impossible to fix after-the-fact. You could EQ the tracks on the computer, but they’d still be out of phase, and they wouldn’t sound proper. There is software to correct phase, but it costs a metric assload of money, and is not something you are going to find as an option in any consumer or professional recording software. It’s a VST plugin for recording and mastering studios’ digital recording setups. For cassette transfers, it’s way beyond overkill. For that, we use a screwdriver.
fishbicycle, professional audio restoration engineer.
If you don’t want to go through all this hassle to do it at home, you can always find a recording studio who may do it for a fee.
I also have access to all the equipment needed to do this.
Robin
Here’s a thread from last year that discussed this topic with a focus on converting to MP3 files. Don’t know if that’s good enough for you…
GT
If your computer can burn CDs, and it doesn’t have an audio input, here’s a product I came across recently for digitizing analog audio sources: