I have some cassette tapes that I would like to convert to digital sound files. (This is not music, but recordings of bird calls. Most cuts would be no more than a couple of minutes at most.) I’ve done a little poking around on the web looking for downloadable programs that will permit me to use the line-in jack on my computer to input them directly from my tape recorder. However, I have little sense of how easy the different ones are to use and which of them might be the best.
I’d appreciate input from anyone who might have some experience in this. (Anything that works for music will probably be OK for my tapes as well.) A free downloadable program would be great, but one that’s not too expensive would be OK too.
I second Audacity: easy to use, and surprisingly flexible and powerful, considering it’s extremely free - especially useful if you want to sequence each bird call into a separate track.
However, you may do better by first boosting your cassette player through an amp and then into the computer line-in: the direct signal from a cassette player alone probably isn’t strong enough.
This comes up every once in a while; there are several old threads on the topic.
Personally, I use Microsoft’s Plus! Analog Recorder. I don’t know whether it’s as good or better than the alternatives, either in general or for your specific purposes, but in my own experience, I’ve found nothing simpler to use or more effective for the specific purpose of copying cassette tapes to digital files (and splitting tracks, cleaning up tape hiss, etc.).
I third Audacity. It has a feature that is inexplicably unusual among recorders, which is a phantom line-in called “What U Hear”. If all else fails and you cannot tell WHAT your computer is listening to when you set it to WAV/CD/Auxiliary/Mic and you’re still not getting anything recorded, then set the input to What U Hear and anything that is successfully routed to your speakers will also be successfully routed to Audacity.
Good luck, and godspeed. Turning linear sequences of recordings into separate tracks or a track with index stops is a pain in the never-mind.
I’ve heard good things about Audacity, but haven’t yet tried it. Does it handle separating tracks in the best and easiest manner? For a project like yours, I would imagine you would need some hand work, but for a typical LP rip, I would like to use something as simple and automatic as possible.
While we’re at it, how about a method of doing this through a usb port. My laptop does not have an input to the sound card. I’ve seen some converters, but the reviews on them were kind of iffy. Anyone have good experiences?
Well, since no one else has answered this, I’m going to risk offering a comment that may be completely unhelpful.
As luck would have it, I recently bought myself a Creative Zen Nano MP3 player, and found that it apparently has the capability to connect to an audio source (like a cassette player) and record the input as MP3 files, which could then presumably be moved to a computer via the USB connection. I haven’t tried this out yet, though, so I don’t know how well it works.
Thanks! I’ll check that out. That would be a handy thing to have, and the only MP3 player I have, which I got as a gift, is pretty feeble. The trouble with the other solutions I’ve seen is that they are a lot of money to move a few very rare albums to my computer.