Cassette Tape To MP3 Question

Factual Questions
1

My library had a book sale and I managd to get a whole bunch of books on tape for a buck. Which is great.

Most were on CD which are easily transferred to my mp3 player, but I got some on cassette. This is fine 'cause I also have a sony cassette player. Well I should say HAD.

Yesterday it broke. Figures huh?

Now I do have a boombox with a cassette player. I was online reading and a lot of websites say “just connect the ‘line out’ from your tape player to your computer.”

Well my cheapo boombox doesn’t have a “line out.” I have read other sites saying “if you don’t have a ‘line out’ just connect it to your ‘headphone’ connection instead.”

Now these are books on tape, not music, so I don’t need excellent quality. Just acceptable quality.

The question is, I seem to recall someone once telling me you will blow your soundcard out if you connect something through the headphones instead of your line out.

Does anyone have any experience with this? I guess I could go buy another cassette-like walkman device but the iPod is rather nice for it’s small size.

Any input I’d appreciate

2

AFAIK, you can just use your headphone out set to, say, 1/4 volume. Set the volume too high, and you’ll probably get distortion. You can always boost the volume when the files are on your computer.

3

I’ve ripped analog to mp3 via
a) the headphone out on a stereo receiver (ripping vinyl) and
b) the headphone out on a walkman (ripping an original song that I home-recorded originally on a portastudio)

4

I’ve done it with an audiobook. My tape player only had a headphone jack, I plugged it into the computer via the mic jack I think. It worked.

5

hell if you arent worried about sound quality you could just play the tape on the boom box into a mic hooked up to your pc and skip the direct wire connection.

6

Being a… hardware guy, i tend to think hardware solutions

http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/drives/7a8d/

7

I have used the headphone jack to the line in for this purpose and other than poor quality it worked fine. It’s been a while but I remember I got the best quality by keeping the volume very low. The best quality I could get would be totally unacceptable for any kind of music but it was (just barely) OK for audiobooks.

YMMV

8

I tried that and it’s awful sounding. But thanks for the other ideas. I’ll give them a go <cross fingers>

9

I’ve also done this a few times. I bought an adaptor to connect the small pronged wire I had with the headphone jack. As mentioned, keep the volume low. I used Audacity to capture the output, which then was able to remove the worst case distortions, with passable results for music. A bit tinny as a result of Audacity’s clean up though.

10

I pretty much did what Cugel described and my recording came out sounding even better than the original cassettes.

I used this adapter. If you have a cassette stereo with RCA jacks, you can even get away with a better deal here.

I followed these instructions and also these for cleaning up any noise.