What's the best way to transfer music from old cassette tapes to my computer?
Asked by
Nellster (
20
)
August 11th, 2007
I have many cassettes with music that I won't find anywhere else. What's the best way to get them onto my computer and into mp3 format?
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7 Answers
I have done this a few times (long ago). Basically, you just hook your tape player's audio out into your computer's audio in, grab some recording software, and go. There are many, many ways to do it that will give you varying quality/ease. But since you're starting with tapes, the quality is never going to be amazing, so I wouldn't start spending too much (unless you have some compelling reason that you need to max out on quality).
If you don't already have a tape player with an audio out, you should be a able to find a decent one from on craigslist for free or next to it (I gave a away one a few days ago). And if you're computer has an mic in (you can buy an audio interface if you don't have one), plug in the necessary cables (depending on the tape output), grab some software like Audacity , and just start going for it. You'll also have a final step of adding to iTunes (or what you use) where you can convert it to mp3/aac, or if you're picky, you could use lame.
It's pretty labor intensive if you want to go song by song, but it will work.
Ben great answer. Though my software of choice would be Micrsoft Plus- Digital Media Edition it is easy to use plus it does so many other cool things beside convert media. Google it and download it.
Beware, some of the software is setup by default to introduce track breaks whenever it detects silence for a couple of seconds. You can usually adjust this interval, according to whether you want it to do the breaking or you want to do it yourself later.
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I tried this using two different boomboxes with a headphone jack. I am using Audacity but playback is filled with a lot of static. However, playback from the cassette tape with headphone plugged into the boombox produces no static. Thoughts? Do I need to adjust anything in the Microphone volume control settings?
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