T1B

Does anyone know a method of transferring cassettes to CD, or directly to a hard drive? My friend has a CD Recorder that captures LPs and cassettes directly to CD, but it's very shaky...currently it's up on blocks.

I've done plenty of cassettes to my HD. I run an RCA line from the cassette player to my sound card. If necessary, you may need to get a RCA to 1/8 adaptor to connect the RCA line to your card. I then record them in Sound Forge and manualy break them up into tracks.

wouldn't it be faster to just download the stuff you want off eMule?

Dude, if you can find the Primrods' first demo on eMule, let me know. I have dozens of cassettes from local bands, and I've tried transferring them, but it's pretty time consuming.

mouse wrote:wouldn't it be faster to just download the stuff you want off eMule?

Here's the thing. Some 10 years ago, a band I was in recorded some stuff. All we had was a DAT. We made a cassette of that, and kept the DAT.

Now, the DAT is lost, and all we have is a failing cassette tape of what we had recorded. We're trying to get that band back together, and we want to do some of that old stuff...but I need to convert the tape into something digital, so that I can be sure it won't be destroyed by a cassette player.

Depending on the quality you want you can:

If you don't mind spending $140, try this audio Tape deck for the PC:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/audio/7a8d/
Presumably, if the actual tape hardware is decent, this would give you the best quality capture since you wouldn't get any outside interference, but its far from the cheapest solution.

The cheap route is to take any cassette player like a sony walkman and use any 3.5 mm male to 3.5 mm male cable to connect your tape deck head phone out to your computer's audio input. Then get your hand on software, there is a ton of them out there, and you can record it as a wav. I would first record it as a wav and then if you want, you can convert it to an mp3 from the wav or you can edit the songs and then burn them as tracks to a CD.

If you want to ensure the higher quality recording, I would use a higher end tape deck and use a better quality sound card or maybe a USB Video/Audio capture device and get your hands on a short good quailty cable. The setup is still the same except you might go from an RCA out to RCA in or 3.5mm audio in on your sound card. Since you plan on getting your band back together, you might consider getting some semi-pro software with good hardware to get some decent recordings from your band. You might look at companies like M-Audio.


Software:
If you want to go free, try Audacity for recording from a CD, dvd or any audio input and then editing. It may not be professional yet but it has some great tools and effects for a quick job.

If you have an Apple, you can try out the new GarageBand software, which is part of ILife. It has received some decent reviews and its really neat because it supports Ipods and Podcasting, which is a neat feature for up and coming bands.

M-Audio has come out with Session as an aswer to GarageBand. Its supposed to have a lot of the same or similar features as the Apple software.

B-Smack already mentioned Sony's Sound Forge Studio which is good for 'budding professionals' according to Sony, but they also have Sound Forge 8 for professionals for $299.

Obviously there are other options for software and hardware. You might consider checking out websites like: http://createdigitalmusic.com/.

Good luck!

thanks, guys.