Getting my cassette music onto my computer

[Stealth]

I have some cassette tapes I want put on my computer so I can upload them onto the internet. Any suggestions?

[Mr-e-Man]

Jump into the wayback machine and invest in CD's.

The only other thing I can think of is to buy a high-quality microphone and record the music thataways.

[Hålo]

Well, you can do 2 things.

1. Go on to any of the file-sharing networks and get the song from there, if possible.

2. Buy a cassette drive. Cassettes used to be the CDs of computers before floppies and CDs. I'm sure that you can still find one in a major computer store if you ask for it.

[bluevorlon]

1) Find a cassete player with a line-out.

2) Plug this into your microphone input on your PC.

3) Record the cassette as one massive wav file using MS-Sound-Recorder or other such program.

4) Encode wav to Mp3,

5) Upload to internet.

[Aquarius]

3) Record the cassette as one massive wav file using MS-Sound-Recorder or other such program.


Could you not pause the cassette tape player, stop recording, then save?

[Metho]

for some odd reason. line out to microphone in results in heaps of sound degredation. I had much better luck going tape deck line out to my soundblaster line in.

Also, using high quality interconnect cable and terminals helps too. The ones I use have gold annodised terminals.

[Dan Van Crone]

I've done this before with excellent results.

Microphone = bad. You need to get to RadioShack or somewhere similar and buy a cable which has a stereo 3.5mm headphone jack on each end.

If you're outputting your signal from a walkman or some other non-preamped device you should plug it into your soundcard via the microphone jack. If on the other hand your outputting from some device which has a preamp, like a tapedeck on a stereo then you should connect it via the line in jack on your soundcard. If there's too much amping going on you'll get oversignal and it will come out sounding shite.

All you need to do then is save it as a wav (high quality - 44,000khz 16-bit stereo) and then encode it to an mp3 using your preferred program. I recommend CDEX with the LAME endcoder.

Knock yourself out.

[oneredpanther]

forget writing to WAV using line-in sources. what you need is a tiny little app called DP Power Amp Music Converter (http://www.dbpoweramp.com/) which will record directly to MP3 from any source you like.

It's the most useful music thing i've ever found. Rips audio CDs, totally customisable, auxilliary input MP3 writing, changes the bitrates and formats of sound files etc....

hope that helps somewhat.

[The_Assimilator]

Hmmm, you all seem to know a lot about this sorta stuff ;)

[bluevorlon]

I meant Line Out to Microphone as in the microphone input slot on your soundcard, which on many is the Line-In input...