Cassette tapes

This may have been brought up a long time ago but is there a way to make a decent sounding mp3 out of cassette tapes? I have quite a few that I like and really don't want to have to go out and buy them all on cd's if I don't have to.

Hi,

Ive been using audiograbber to make some of my cassette tapes into mp3s. I just hooked the stereo's line out connector to my pc's line in connector.


Sean

Yes, you can digitally record them by plugging your casette player into the line-in of your computer's sound card.

It's a bit of a pain to do, and you have to know a little bit about audio recording techniques (understanding things like level adjustments, noise floor, and clipping), but it can be done.

Many CD-recorder drives come with software that's meant to help you do this sort of thing: Turn your cassettes and LPs into CDs. You probably already own such a piece of software and you've just never used it yet. You can just skip the part about burning the CD and instead take the resulting WAV files and compress them into MP3s for the player.

Thanks guys for the answers. I'll have to give that a go. I don't have any software for a cd burner to use since I don't have one but I do have Audiograbber. Now I can sleep better tonight

The older version of Adaptec's "Easy CD Creator" was pretty good at this, and easy to set up. I "recorded" a lot of old records a year or so ago with it.

I used to have access to things like that when I worked in a computer shop but I don't now. I'll have to ask around the people I know if any of them have a copy of that.

MUSICMATCH does it too. I've never done it myself, but it's pretty straightforward. You select the line-in as the source for the recorder and hit record. You can even tell it to do auto-detect of gaps so that it will generate separate mp3s for each track.

I did this a few years back when I first got into Mp3's.

Actuallymost of my collection was on cassette. I had about 200 CD's 500 cassettes and about 100 Lp's.

It's time consuming but it's worth it. I used CoolEdit Pro to do it with.

That program I have. Do you know how to go about doing it with that?

I guess I should clarify that a little. I used CoolEdit Pro because it uses DirectX plugins. I tried using CoolEdit's noise reduction but it was too time intensive so I used Sonic Foundry's Noise Reduction Plugin which was real simple.

You start recording a few seconds before the music starts and stop a few seconds after it ends.
Then you highlight the section with no music and let the noise filter use that as it's baseline, then apply the filtering effects over the entire song so it removes all similar noise that is present in the rest of the recording.

Hope that helps.

I'm giving it a go now using Audiograbber. I'll have to see how it sounds when I am done with the first one. I've only got about 20 to record.

CoolEdit is very handy for situations where one wants to just rerecord the whole album (or side A/B), and then split it up into tracks afterwards.. the waveform cut/paste function makes it really simple.

Cheers

After all of the help from everyone I can't try it now. I went to use my tape deck this morning, put a tape in, hit rewind and nothing. Wouldn't even open to let my tape out, had to force it and now it's hanging open, useless. Kind of like the CD player above it. Time to get a new system.

Hmmph.. mine did that one day too, so it got converted into my empeg base (docking) station after that!

-ml

You should check if there are any garage sales this weekend. I bought two JVC dual tape decks for $15 each a couple years ago. They work like champs.

i have been through this learning curve - heres my solution :

1. Audiograbber to rip through line in.
2. Batch normalise using audiograbber
3. Use CD Wave editor http://www.homepages.hetnet.nl/~mjmlooijmans/cdwave/ to auto split the 90 minute tape, or split at intervals (I use every 6 mins) if there are no audible gaps. Manually trim the start & stop point, and the break during the auto reverse phase. Save as a list of new fragmented wav files, delete the previous unfragmented file. This is v. time consuming and is - i believe - hard drive access speed rather than processor limited. I tend to process two wav's at once from each of my two hard drives to ease the frustration.
4. Batch encode using razor lame
5. Tag using tag and rename - either manually or via the builkt in allmusic.com feature. This software is awesome and (almost) entirely replaced my other tagging software.
6. Create new directory structure using tag and rename, then integrate into your current playlist directory
6. Hit sync !

best of luck

John

If it was part of a rack system that would work, but it is one of those all-in-one systems which I think I will stay clear of this time. Got my Crutchfield catalog out to start looking.

I went to Circuit City to look around and felt totally lost as to what to get. If money was no object it would be a different story. But maybe I should start with good speakers and reciever and build it up from there. My biggest tv is 19" as I don't watch it much and don't plan to get a bigger one, rather hear good music.

I recently converted about 200 minidiscs to MP3. It was quite a lot of work, but I did discover some free software and resources that helped: XMCD2CUE, MusiCutter, freedb and HMSCalc.

Once you have the MP3, you can get the artist and title information from www.freedb.org. Save this text file to your hard drive.

Then, use XMCD2CUE to convert that file into a .cue sheet.

Now, open the cue sheet and large MP3 using MusiCutter. This is an MP3 splitting utlity that doesn't resample the MP3 so it's fast and doesn't degrade quality.

MusiCutter will split the MP3 into a file for each track. You can specify the file name format using artist, album, title and track number.

Test the track marks using your MP3 player software, and make any adjustments. You can repeat the MP3 splitting as many times as necessary.

HMSCalc is a small chronological calculator that I used to do the time arithmetic. This was handy for calculating the start points of tracks for albums that didn't exist in freedb. For instance, live recordings where I had the cue time information on the minidisc. You may not need this.

Hope that helps.

If your house is anything like mine, you've probably got at least a couple of old tape walkmans stuffed away in boxes somewhere. Those will work too, if you carefully adjust the volume on the headphone outputs. Dunno if the quality will be worse that way or not, though. Hmm...

Nothing here to play a tape on whatsoever. They'll just have to sit and wait until I can encode them. Got one song done last night, woohoo!

It always seems to be something that goes. One of the joys of home ownership.

Might find a friend or relative with a portable boombox... Could rig a headphone output into the sound card to record through. Buy them dinner after you return it.

I looked around a while for tape players, so I could do this same thing, and found that (perhaps due to them being rare), a good component tape deck was 100's of $$$'s, even from a pawn shop, it was just silly.

Well, good luck!

Borrowed one from a neighbor without having to promise a dinner. How do I go about rigging up something between the player and the sound card?

How do I go about rigging up something between the player and the sound card?

tape player line-level outputs --> adapter cable from ratshack --> sound card line-level Input.

The last Nero burning ROM version I used was able to split a giant .wav file up into separate wave files at the points where I told it too. (it has it's own waveform editor)
The impressive part was that it did this on the fly and automatically gave all the split tracks separate track numbers. (without the need to save the new .wav tracks)

If I chose "0ms" between track intervals, they burned perfectly seamless as well.

Thanks Tony. I just checked to see if I had one but I don't. I just bought a RCA to RCA there today so I could listen to the empeg through the stereo instead of through the computer. Back to Radio Shack I go.

...so I could listen to the empeg through the stereo instead of through the computer...

If the empeg was plugged into the sound card's Line Input, then that's the cable you should need. The outputs on the tape player should be the same as the outputs on the empeg. Two line-level RCA plugs.

It's a portable boombox with only a place for a headphone jack in it.

Well, a headphone jack outputs an amplified signal. Like the Walkman example I cited above, you'll have to be very careful with setting the volume level so that it doesn't overdrive the inputs. Not sure how the quality level of that will compare to a proper line-level dubbing.

I doubt it will be as good. I hate to go out and buy a $150 tape player just to encode 20 or so tapes then never use it again. The other option would be to buy another crappy all-in-one system which I'd rather not do.

If they sound really bad I'll come up with a plan #2.

Sometimes, the cable that connects your computer speakers to the soundcard is the same cable that would connect your headphone jack to the PC's line-in. So you might not have to make the trip to ratshack. Just borrow that cable during recording and use headphones to listen to the PC's output while you're working on it.

I hate to go out and buy a $150 tape player

Then do what I do -- go to ebay. :-)

Right now there are nearly 500 cassette players of one variety or another on sale, here's one that closes in two and a half hours that would do what you want for less than $10.

tanstaafl.

ew, yuck, that's mono and doesn't have a line out...

ew, yuck, that's mono and doesn't have a line out...

Whatever...

I just grabbed the first auction I saw, didn't look carefully at it -- the point being that there are literally hundreds of cassette players for sale on ebay at trivial prices, and certainly some of them will meet the requirements.

But you knew that...

tanstaafl.

Is MusiCutter the best way to achieve gapless playback when listining to MP3's ripped from line-in ?

My process listed above does leave a very short 'blip' (0.1 sec maybe) in between tracks.

Is MusiCutter the best way to achieve gapless playback when listining to MP3's ripped from line-in ?

Please read the FAQ entries on this subject:

"This method isn't perfect, because MP3 frames are not fully independent of one another. If a file is split at a frame boundary, some of the data from the previous file is not carried over when the next file starts playing. This creates a tiny "blip" at the transition point between two songs. It's much less annoying than an actual gap of silence, though."

Also, when you say "listening to MP3's", do you mean on the car player or on your PC? If it's on your PC, your player software has to play the files without gaps. Most players will pause between songs as they cache the next tune. For instance, if using WinAmp, you need a gapless output plugin, linked from the FAQ because it goes with my GapKiller utility.

It is when listening to continuous MP3's on the player when I hear the blip.

In terms of continuous playback, would an MP3 post-process using gapkiller on split MP3's be a better solution than ripping to a large MP3 then splitting using Musicutter ?

I have been splitting large wav's using CD Wave editor - then encoding with lame. I am not sure if the wav splitting process itself intoduces a gap as part of its processing, in which case gapkiller would not solve the problem I guess.. ...

that was my first 'refer to faq' by the way, so please go easy on me ...

In terms of continuous playback, would an MP3 post-process using gapkiller on split MP3's be a better solution than ripping to a large MP3 then splitting using Musicutter ?

First, keep in mind that Gapkiller actually has both functions in it now: The hand-trimming feature is there, as well as the "split a large MP3" feature. So Musicutter isn't the specific issue, it's the method.

As I state in the FAQ, the hand-trimming with Gapkiller produces slightly better results than simply splitting a large MP3. However, it takes a lot of work to get it right, and you MUST configure WinAmp properly ahead of time (installing the referenced plug-in) to do the trial-and-error previewing.

I am not sure if the wav splitting process itself intoduces a gap as part of its processing,

Unlikely. The encoder is what's adding the gap. As I state in the FAQ, the encoder adds the silence to the MP3 files itself.

Ouch - another 2 refer to faq's !

Only kidding - thanks for the help.