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Recording analogue sound on a PC.

Soapy Sam

Penultimate Amazing
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Oct 23, 2002
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I'm ditching a pile of cassettes. I'd like to copy a few to the pc and put them on a CD. A couple are music, plus some recorded talk- elderly relative, now deceased.
Running Win XP. I have no multimedia software beyond what came with the O.S.
Tried using "Sound Recorder", through the microphone socket, from the headset output on mt tape deck. Results very poor and "sound recorder" only records 60 second bursts.

What's a cheap and effective way to do this?
 
I'll try to dig through my LangaList newsletter archives for an article that covered this subject not too terribly long ago.
 
Heh, I found it in the third newsletter I looked at.
Convert Cassettes and Records to CDs
Every week, I get a few mails like the following. Sometimes it's about cassette tapes, other times about old vinyl records, but the gist is always the same:

Hi Fred: I have a bunch of cassettes and would like to put them on cds. I have heard this is possible but wondering if you know of any free software that you would recommend for this purpose. thank you.--- hans mensch
Click to expand...
I was gathering information to write a how-to, but then I saw this, which did a better job than I probably would have: http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/news/1316/

If you want to capture audio from almost any source and burn it to CD, the above site will help a lot!
Click to expand...

Looks like a great resource.
 
You'll need to invest in a sound card w/ shielded inputs. It will have to be shielded because the inside of your computer is full of noise-generating electrical interference, as you found w/ your first attempt.

If the music is very important to you, you'll want to make sure the card has decent A/D converters also.

Many sound cards come w/ a stripped down version of Sound Forge, which would be adequate for recording to your hard disc. This will record your cassettes to hard disc as one large .wav file. You can then normalize it to maximize volume. If you have the full version of Sound Forge you can do other things, like remove tape hiss.

I would recommend CD Wave to cut up the files into individual tracks, as it by default will split it along sector boundaries, otherwise you could get pops and clicks between tracks. This is free, you can d/l it here.
 
Here is a link to a sound recording and editing program.

COOL151.ZIP File size: 777060 bytes File date: 95-11-23

Cool Edit v.1.51 is a waveform editor with features such as: Echo, Flange, Reverb, Stretch/Pitch Change, Compress, Brainwave Synchronizer, Noise Reducer, Envelope, Filter, Distortion, and more. Supports most every file format. Cue and Play list. View waves as amp.

from http://www.amtechdisc.com/Audio.Util.Html
 
A common cause of bad recordings is to have the record level volume slider set too high.
 
I too have recently been digging out old tapes and LP's and converting them, mostly, I have been using audacity, mormalise the wavs and burn them to cd's.

I do have a rather expensive hi-fi setup for phono and tape, but no matter what I have done to the recordings they do still sound 'not all there' so, as long as its not classical music, I feel quite happy to download it from winmx or kazaa as an mp3 (I already bought the music ).

If your just wanting it or in the car or background it will suffice, if you want to listen properly, you have to either buy the music again, or ask someone to copy it for you.
 
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