How to burn cds from cassettes?

Factual Questions
1

Is there an easy way to transfer all my cassettes to cds using my computer?

For instance, can I just buy some sort of cable to plug a cassette player into my computer and use my cd burning software?

Or must I buy some special cassette player and new software.

I want to do it cheaply.

2

What you’ll need:

  1. A CD burner.

  2. CD Burning Software

  3. A decent Sound card

  4. Sound editing software.

It appears you already have atleast the first 2 required items. You’ll also need a decent sound card in your computer, and some decent sound editing software to clean up the audio. (google GoldWave, I believe they have a try out period for their software and it’s both very good and very affordable).

You just connect your tape player to your sound card’s “line in” jack and record each song. Clean up the sound, and encode as mp3, or leave as a WAV file. Then use your CD burning software to burn into an mp3 or a regulard music CD.

3

There was a recent thread on here asking about transferring vinyl to CD. The advice is generally the same. Note that you don’t need to record each song individually - most decent programs for doing this will let you record a whole side of the tape, and then automatically (or manually, if you prefer) divide up the file into individual tracks, so that the resulting CD will have proper tracks that you can skip to. I have been doing this recently for both vinyl and tape, and have used Groove Mechanic, which has a free trial period and works well.

For the actual burning process, I used Roxio Easy CD creator. It’s worth using software that will burn “Disc At Once” rather than “Track At Once”, as the latter introduces annoying two-second gaps between tracks - especially irritating for live recordings, where you get a gap in the crowd noise between songs if you use TAO.

4