I was downloading a song tonight off iTunes – a live version of Big Star’s “September Gurls” – that I actually already have, but it’s on an old mix tape, and the process of transferring songs from cassette to computer seems, well, alien and scary to me. How hard is it? Would it make more sense to just keep downloading those songs off iTunes instead?
Well, it’s going to still sound like crap, and actually it will probably lose quality because if you’re asking this Q in the first place, you probably have a cheap soundcard with cheap A/D (analogue to digital) converters.
It would be as simple as running a line out of the cassettte deck into your computer’s soundcard, opening a .wav editor like CoolEdit Pro/Adobe Audition, and then hitting “record” in that program and then “play” on the tape.
Or on my Mac, you just get a mini-to-mini patch cord and plug the ‘headphone out’ or ‘line out’ from your tape deck into your ‘audio in’ slot, then record the song using Sound Studio or something similar.
You can also use a free program called Audacity to save the audio. Works very nicely. You’ll have to spend some time trimming the file and cutting it into tracks, but it works.
I do this kind of thing for a living. It’s very simple and can result in very good transfers. The things that can mess it up are 1) azimuth misalignment and b) playback speed. It’s 99% guaranteed that if you don’t use the same deck you recorded the tape on to transfer it to the computer, it will play back too fast or too slow, and there will be phase anomalies because the playback head is not in the precise spot that the one which recorded the tape was in. If you make the connection and it sounds fine, don’t worry about it. But if it sounds bright in one channel and dull in the other, you have azimuth problems. This is only a precision screwdriver adjustment, but after you make it, your deck will be misaligned for all the tapes you made on it. This is why cassettes, as a permanent storage medium, suck.
I’ve done a lot of this. I have a cassette deck (that I bought cheap off e-bay) hooked up to my computer. The program I use is Microsoft’s Plus! Analog Recorder, which is part of their Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition add-on pack for Windows XP; it makes the process about as easy as it could be. But of course, which program you use will depend on your needs, desires, and OS.
I use an iMic made by Griffin Technologies. You jack the cassette RCA leads coming off your deck directly into the female RCA leads in the iMic. The other end of the iMic is FireWire, and jacks into the Mac.
The software accompanying it is called Final Vinyl. ( Yeah. I know. At least it isn’t called iNyl… 
)
Works like a chahm. Allows the sounds to be saved in a variety of popular formats.
Cartooniverse
Sounds like something I should at least try, while not hoping for especially wonderful results.
I agree. Let us know how it goes.
I’ll second the recommendation for Audacity. It’s very small, and very simple. Not a ton of features, but it’s got everything you should need for this.
I’ve done the same kind of thing with GoldWave for both cassette and reel-to-reel tape. GoldWave has a variety of filters that will help to remove tape hiss, or the pops and clicks from “loved” vinyl. Best output is from the audio “out” jack (rather than the earphone jack) so long as your computer’s audio card can take a lower-level (not preamplified) signal.