I have Win Me and I would like ot record to Cd's some music
that I have on cassetts, will I get a good reproduction? Do need to
add some kind of extra sound card to my cpu? Appreciate any and all
help. thanks in advance. cl.
I have been converting literally hundreds of hours of book-on-tape titles
and after a while the process becomes fairly painless (although boredom is
always a problem). I use a Pioneer 6-cassette changer deck which takes a bit
of work out of it but I feed its output directly into the line input of my
low-priced Creative sound card and use Creative's recorder application.
After the deck has gone through the cassettes it has been fed I transfer the
huge WAV file produced to my main computer over the network, edit the huge
WAV into smaller ones trimming as I go, then I convert the WAV files into
MP3 files using RazorLAME. I then even out the levels using MP3Gain. If I
was producing straight audio CDs the last two steps wouldn't be required.
The sound reproduction using this method is surpisingly good although there
are a lot of variables to keep track of -- the most important being watching
the record levels. Music cassettes might not suffer from the same problems
but book-on-tape titles have really terrible level fluctuations (sometimes
12dB variance from tape to tape in the same set) and unless they are kept
under control you can wind up with either the audio being buried in noise or
being clipped and distorted.
BTW, I've used similar methods to convert old vinyl titles to MP3 but with
tape you have the constant problem of noise, ticks, and pops. There are
specialized programs that are supposed to take care of these problems but I
haven't tried any of them personally.
--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]
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