Cassette --> MP3 advice needed

SWMBO has a few tape cassettes (~200 of them!) that she wants me to convert into MP3 files.

In the past I have done this in my recording studio using Total Recorder (the paid-for Pro edition) but this has proven less than an ideal situation for several reasons.

First, Total Recorder does not play well with my Tunebite program, and Tunebite is more important to me than Total Recorder.

Second, Total Recorder is too feature-rich. It tries to be everything to everybody and as a result the user interface is far too complex for what should be a simple task of playing a cassette and turning it into an MP3 file.

Third, Total Recorder won't automatically break out the individual songs on the cassette into separate MP3 files. (Yes, I know, it claims to do this but I never was able to make it work.)

So, I'm looking for a better (i.e., simpler, faster, and more automated) way of doing this. I do not want to be in the position of having to baby sit each cassette, listening to them play and manually changing the output file at each song. Nor do I want to end up with 90-minute long MP3 files that I have to go into with an editor and split up after the fact, although that would be preferable to the baby sitting option.

Amazon sells this unit, but after reading the reviews (particularly the 1-star reviews) I wouldn't own it on a bet.

Reading through those reviews, however, led me to Audacity software. Has anybody used this software, and would it, in tandem with my "recording studio", be useful for what I want to do, or are there better (simple, fast, automated) ways to accomplish the task?

tanstaafl.

I use Audacity quite a bit to digitise my LPs and a few cassettes.

I find the software gives good results for recording quality.

I have not found any way of automating track splits though, I just record each side as one file then split them manually. This is not too painful providing the songs do have silence between them and/or you know the length of each song. It is reasonably fast if you use the keyboard shortcuts for selection (track start to cursor etc.)

I'd be inclined to record each cassette side as one big lossless file and then deal with splitting the songs after the fact. This does mean that you'll need a "lot" of disk space: 200 cassettes * ~50 min/cassette * 60 sec/min * 44100 samples/sec * 32 bits/sample * 1/8 bytes/bit * 1/1024 kbytes/byte * 1/1024 Mbytes/kbyte * 1/1024 Gbytes/Mbyte ~= 100GB. Less if you use some sort of lossless compression.

But then you have all the data on the computer and you don't have to deal with the cassettes again while you figure out the splitting.

I did this semi successfully with Audiograbber a few years ago, might be worth trying (it's free)?

I know there's no way you'd ever take this particular piece of advice, but:

Just buying the music over again on CD, or on Amazon MP3, is going to be infinitely easier and take much less time, and produce better results.

I would be surprised if the majority of those 200 cassette tapes were unavailable on CD/MP3.

At least $2000 is a lot of scratch. Especially for a retired man with lots of time on his hands.

Each tape will require about two hours of work to convert to MP3. 2000 dollars with great quality, or 400 hours with medicore-to-bad quality?

It must take you a really long time to press a play button and walk away.

I agree with you in principle, but $2000 is a lot, especially for stuff that, more likely than not, is more in the category of rather-not-lose than necessity. (They are cassette tapes that hadn't already been upgraded, after all.)

If those tapes are mix tapes, then even the buy CDs route still involves a lot of work.

The friendly neighborhood used CD store is a great place to start for 'old' (as in 'not current') music.

You got that right!

A lot (if not most) of these cassettes are 20+ years old, and my guess is SWMBO wants them turned into MP3s not so that she can listen to them, but just so she'll still have them available on the off chance that she'll ever want to hear them again.

My guess is that they'll just sit gathering dust on my hard drive, but it'll make her happy.

tanstaafl.

I did a bit of both: Transferred my cassettes to MP3 and put them in my collection - as some of them dated from the mid 60's and my tastes have changed somewhat, those I found that I still liked, I subsequently purchased the CD/downloads, it's extraordinary the price of some of these Amazon deals.
With vinyl L.P.s, I found that I could get a highly acceptable quality (Partly because from the mid 70's each time I purchased an LP, I immediately put it on a chrome cassette). On the odd tracks which jumped or had a click, I just replaced the one track with a downloaded one.
I used software called Audiotools which very capably did the track splits. Unfortunately because he was so fed up with being pirated and generally ripped of, the author has withdrawn it.

I think this is what you need. You can use it to copy your cassettes to MP3 and it will even make separate files per track on the tape. In other words: make this task a lot easier for you. (note: I've not ever tried this myself; I simply remembered ever reading about this a couple of years ago)

I randomly stumbled across this today. I don't know if there's anything about it any better than what you've already go going on, but I'd be remiss if I didn't pass it along. Maybe the bundled software is worth looking at?

IMO, since you've already bought the music, I'd consider it fair use to just download the ones you can find. Sure, the uploader is breaking fair-use and likely some laws, but you the downloader would probably not (INAL of course). You're just doing a format conversion, in an alternate round-about way than digitizing the cassettes.

I wouldn't disagree, but I'm pretty sure there's precedent that has made that definitely "illegal".

Yeah, wasn't that Napster's model or something? I don't remember.

No, Napster's model was just straight forward p2p exchange of ripped tracks. The "you can download the mp3s if you have the CD" was someone else's model Can't remember who it was, I think there was more than one service with the same model.

Wasn't that the model that the Napster guy wanted to TRY after Napster got in trouble for P2P sharing?

Yeah, but there is a palpable difference between having a CD and having a cassette, as has been argued by people here. Do people own a license to a piece of music, or do they merely own the physical medium? I'm pretty sure that it's been legally established that it's the latter.

Thanks, Bitt, but as stated in the very first post in this thread, "Amazon sells this unit, but after reading the reviews (particularly the 1-star reviews) I wouldn't own it on a bet."

I think I will end up doing it with my "recording studio" and Audacity software -- just let the cassette run and then split it up into separate files after the fact. I wonder if Audacity will multi-task and record one file from cassette while I use another instance of the program to split up the previous cassette? Or, for that matter, I guess I can just play the cassette into the line-in using Windows Recorder while using Audacity to split the previous cassette, then turn the split files into MP3s with dBpoweramp and get rid of the *.wavs.

tanstaafl.

Whoops.

Any "copying," including ripping a CD you own, transcoding an audio cassette you own, etc. is, strictly speaking, in violation of copyright. You don't have a license to the music, you only own the medium. There's nothing in the purchase of a CD, LP, nor cassette, including printed on the medium, packaging or inserts, granting you any type of license. The copyright holder (author) holds an exclusive license and only they can transfer or grant additional licenses.

Even playing a digital recording on an MP3 player or computer is technically copying the song - it's being cached at least to memory which is a copy of the file on disk. Playing in a browser might further leave you with multiple disk-based cache copies as well.

In the US you have "Fair Use" which can allow an individual to do "things" with the copyrighted work that have not been expressly permitted to them by way of a license. Such a concept may exist in other countries, but I suspect some countries don't have any such provisions, backed by case law or not. The fair use concept doesn't expressly cover making digital copies of your analog recordings (format shifting).

Copyright and Fair Use FAQ (US)

Converting tapes to MP3 - mainly for a few links to EFF etc..

Between Lawyers Blog: Fair Use, Personal Use and the Digital Copyright Morass

That would be the defunct mp3.com's "Beam-It" technology. Their server issued a challenge to the client to compute the hash of some unpredictable range of the CD. If the client could answer enough of these hashes, then they would add the MP3s to your account on the server right away. MP3.com was sued by the RIAA and had to can the service.

Maybe. Strictly speaking the laws are fuzzy enough that it's not always clear what's in violation, and what's not.


It also doesn't expressly cover time-shifting, either, but in Universal vs. Sony, the Supreme Court declared such behaviour as non-infringing. In a way, that decision could also be taken to mean that format shifting is also legal, since the act of time-shifting can only be done by format shifting -- copying television/cable signals onto a physical medium for later playback.

(Naturally, I am not a lawyer, and that's not legal advice.)

I think that the problem that you might have is muting the recording version whilst editing on the other.
Anyway, Audacity is a pain in the **** for editing try MP3 Direct Cut, it's free and very simple to use.

I think that if you have Lame installed, Audacity will export straight to MP3.

Yes, Audacity outputs to MP3 with Lame installed.
However, I've never used MP3 Direct Cut for this, but it would be worth experimenting with, it both records and has "pause detection", presumably for detecting track splits as required.
I'd check it out myself, but I no longer have an analog input to my PC.