I was wondering if any audio nerds could give me any handy tips on capturing some old audio cassettes into digital formats. I realise this is a deep subject that can take years of training and study but I was hoping there were a few “best practices” that a novice should observe within the limits of what I have.
I’ve connected a walkman-type cassette player (horrifying, I know) to the line-in jack of my sound card. That is the extent of my hardware, and I’m getting a signal. So here are my questions:
General questions:
1: What’s a good all-purpose sound editor for a task like this? Right now I’m using CoolEdit 2000. It’s OK but it has some frustrating limitations on the user interface. I don’t mind shelling out $50-100 for something with the knobs and levers I need.
2: Where should I be paying attention to volume settings to avoid distortion? I figured the lower the volume from the device the better. But then I couldn’t get the volume back later.
3: Are there any commonly found features in sound editing the software? I’m thinking like a “make it all sound good” button or the closest thing to that. Or just in general, what do you call the kinds of defects that come from analog cassette and how are they usually attacked?
Problems I’ve already encountered:
1: When I’ve captured the song in memory, generally it sounds pretty good. When I save it to a file, it loses a lot of volume and quality. I tried .wav and .mp3. What’s the best quality format to use as storage?
2: Many of my captures are very satisfactory, but even on the same tape some songs sound like the bass signal is getting clipped. Why could this be? The initial recording was basement-studio stuff, but I know the guy was experienced and knowledgeable (he taught sound engineering at a local trade school, although this was like 15 years ago). I know the bass lines are pretty similar for most songs because I played them myself
A product that I recently purchased is the INport by Xitel. Connected to spare tape monitor jacks or a headphone output, it includes an interface and cabling to mate with a USB port. So far, I’m using it to get my large LP collection moved onto CD, but will eventually get to cassettes.
Another suggestion is Audiograbber, which is free and can do most of the conversions and volume/mixer adjustments you’re interested in. It grabs sound as WAV and can convert to high- or low-bitrate MP3 if you prefer compression. It can grab anything your computer can play through the speakers, given a good enough processor and hard disk.
Once you have the audio grabbed, I second the recommendation of Audacity for tweaking the peaks and clipping extra noise or silence.
Cassettes tend to lose some of the high frequencies over a period of years, so you’ll probably need to use Audacity’s equalizer filter to bring that back. Some of my cassettes were 20+ years old when I digitized them, and with equalization, I got them to the point where they sounded decent again, on a boom box. Sometimes, some of the signal is just gone, and you’ll never recover it.
If your recording warbles on you, remember the old trick of rewinding the tape several times to reduce the tension at the capstan. Old tapes can get brittle though, so don’t go banging it when it hits the end of the leader. I rewound the last foot of some tapes by hand to avoid breakage.
Crinkles in the tape, i.e. where it got tangled around the guts of your girlfriend’s P.O.S. car-deck, pretty much must be lived with. You can smooth them by hand, or with a pencil shaft, but the recording will never be the same.
Dropouts, where a random magnetic field knocked all the high frequencies out of a foot or two of tape, can to some extent be fixed with equalization, but again you’ll never get back the original clarity.
If a track starts or ends with loud annoying sounds, hissing or pops from scratches on the original vinyl, don’t be afraid to use the fade in or fade out filters to eliminate the noise. You’ll never notice that your digitized version of the music is a half second shorter than the original.
If you’ve got a broken tape that you simply must have digitized, scotch tape and an exacto knife can be used to make a servicable splice. If you’ve never done this, practice first. You’ll still end up with a short break in the recording, but most of the cassette is recoverable.
A LOT of your problems can be resolvd by getting a better cassette player. And ensuring that whatever NR system was applied to the cassetes when recorded (Dolby B, etc) is used in the playback.
I used Cakewalk Pyro to digitize my LP’s. Worked quite well. You ask if you can get software that has the equivalent of an “make it all sound good” button. My experience was that to get really superb results you virtually had to tweak track by track. For example, on some tracks I could crank the hiss suppression right up and make it very clean, but on others (with lots of high hat, for example) if you tried that it would suppress what was supposed to be there and make it all sound weird.
Save the recording in 44.1 KHz stereo wave format. That is the standard for a cd.
Look for spikes on the visual graph. You can cut short lengths to remove a spike. You can digitaly change the amplitude a goodly amount, so try to save the recordings with the amplitude similar, thats the volume. You should adjust the amplitude of the input signal watching the graph. You’re to loud if you see the wave forms getting clipped. One you have the final wave file then you can try a mp3 sample. Sometimes the mp3 conversion will sound better, depending on the rate saved. Certain bite rates converted to lose some original distortion, because of dropped out data.
