Part 1
If you are like me who grew up in 1980s, you will no-doubt have a huge collection
of old Audio cassettes (Tapes) that contains your childhood favourties but now lying
somewhere collecting dust. Today you should be lucky to be having a cassette player
in working condition to play them. A decade back I started hunting for my favourite
albums/movies and managed to buy most of them as Audio CDs or MP3 CDs, but I still
long for digitising my old tapes so that I can listen to them where-ever I want. So
few years back I bought an inexpensive cassette player which has a stereo speaker
out (1/8" TRS
Jack in USA or 3.5mm miniature EP Jack in India, which is the standard type used
in your iPod, Computer speakers) . To record involved four steps:
-
I connected the Speaker-out from the player to Line-In in my PC using a standard 3.5mm
Stereo Audio Patch cable like the one shown below. The audio quality depends
on the quality of the cable and the pins used, so buy the best looking one or a branded
one that you can find in your local electronics store.
-
Recording quality turned to be good, but to set the correct volume level in the player
and Mic-level in PC was tricky. That part took me few hours to set it right, too high
the volume in player then you can listen to the audio in your PC speakers but nothing
gets recorded and too low the recorded song can't be heard while played back.
-
Setup Line-In as default "Recording Device" in Windows. This can be done
in Windows Vista by Right-Clicking on the Speaker system tray icon (bottom-right before
time) and selecting "Recording Devices". Then in the dialog (as shown below)
that appears Right-Click and select "Set as Default Device". You might want
to double-click on the Line-in Icon and adjust the audio-levels for fine-tuning. If
everything is working well, then when you play something in your player you will see
the bars on right-hand side of the Line-In row moving up and down.
-
The software used to record took some experimentation as well but was easier. I settled
down with using the free
Windows Media Encoder to record the songs as WMA files and then converting
songs that I needed in my iPhone alone to MP3 files using Nero
WaveEditor. I was not comfortable with directly recording into Nero WaveEditor
or the free Audacity equivalent.
If you are using Windows Vista, you can also try the in-built Sound Recorder as well
that now supports durations longer than 60 seconds but it doesn't offer the level
adjustment controls found in Windows Media Encoder.
That's all it takes to record your tapes as WMA/MP3 files. You are now good to throw-away
your cassettes.
Part 2
Part 2 of this story happened about six months back when during my trip to USA in
June '08 I had purchased a device to make the conversion easier. The device was ION
Audio's Tape2PC. I saw it online and ordered through Amazon for $130 or so.
The device claimed to make it easier for converting the tapes to MP3 using bundled
software and the USB connection (so no cable hunting). I presumed the software does
auto rewinding to beginning of cassette, identifying each track automatically and
auto-reverse once one side of the tape is over, so that we don't need to baby-sit
during the entire tape.
After I got back to India, I never found time (or the interest) to set up this device
until last Sunday. That's when I unwrapped the box, connected the cables and without
a moment's thought switched the Power-ON. I got the display lights for a second and
the device went blank. That's when it stuck me that the device was 110V and I connected
to 220V (in India), and the power supply inside the device should have got burned
. Next day I gave the device to my local Electronic Repair shop (Rajam Electronics, Station
Road, West Mambalam, Chennai -33. Phone: 044-2474 0106) to fix it. They diligently
worked on it, fixed it and gave it to me today. They charged me Rs.400 (USD 8) towards
their service charge and for replacing the 110V transformer to 220V and few other
components that got burned. I brought the device home and plugged in, Windows Vista
promptly deducted the device as a USD Audio CODEC and it worked just fine. The burning
episode was a blessing in disguise, now I don't need to keep connecting every time
a 220V-110V Step-Down adaptor.
The device turned out to be a slight-disappointment. The audio quality was great due
to the USB interface, but the software functionality was limited. No Auto Track Identification,
No Auto-Rewind, No Auto-Reverse - you need to baby sit throughout the cassette play
time, no escape from that. The in-built software (EZ Tape Convertor) does make it
easy to mark each tracks, tagging easier and moves automatically the completed tracks
to iTunes. You can find a detailed product review of Tape2PC
from UK's PCAdvisor here - I suggest you read it before you decide to buy this
device. My opinion is that if you don't mind spending few minutes extra for each cassette
and you don't have that many cassettes then you can safe yourself some money by not
buying this. Instead go with my alternate method suggested in Part-1 of this post.