[Delta-Boudreaux]

PING.....

[Senator Pardek]

There's a great deal of pro and semi-pro software out there that will let you do just that - while saving each song as its seperate track (if you edit it so) so it can be burned onto a CD.

Here's the rub - the average soundcard that comes with a computer is not designed to make HIFI recordings. However, with the software, one can remove tape-hiss, and soundcard noise, plus EQ it like crazy so it sounds better than the original.

Remember, the recording will only be as good as the weakest link allows, so if the souncard does not faithfully pass along 13 kHz to your HD, you may be in trouble.

[Delta-Boudreaux]

PING...

[Leroy S. Mort]

CDRFAQ.ORG has extensive answers to this and other CD Recording questions. A great site to bookmark.

[GalvestonBeachcomber]

GoldWave. Not expensive; does good job. http://www.goldwave.com/

[wooly_mammoth]

http://www.soundblaster.com/products/audigyplatinumex/

I just have an audigy gamer ($70 mail-order) and a pair of sennheiser HD600 headphones ($500 retail, $280 on e-bay) and am very pleased. Wouldn't mind a decent headphone amplifier :) but they're too expensive :(

[ken21]

on a similar note, i have a question:

i have a brand new canon rebel 2000 camera with 28-80 mm lens and warranty.

how much should i advertise it for in the newspaper?

[aruanan]

How do I capture the audio cassettes into the computer.

Go to www.harmonycentral.com and click on software for your computer platform and see what's available. There is much that is free and works quite nicely.

[hc87]

If you have a stereo system, you may want to purchase an audio component CD burner. My wife bought me a TEAC RW-CD22 at COSTCO for less than $200 this Christmas. The TEAC has a function for automatically cutting tracks while it is recording the CD, but it doesn't work as well as I would like, largely because it is difficult to adjust the sensitivity of the CD burner as to when it "hears" silence and adds a cut. This forces me to sometimes manually add cuts during the recording process. Obviously that can be tedious.

The advantage to a component CD burner is that your stereo system is built to allow you to record from one format to another; the end result, soundwise, is pretty good.

The disadvantages are, as described above, the need to sometimes manually cut tracks while recording and the fact that Audio CD-Rs (as distinct from Data CD-Rs used with computers) seem to cost about a dollar per CD, while data CD-Rs are about half of that. Perhaps there are newer models that can use data CD-Rs instead of audio CD-Rs. I don't know.

[Jolly Green]

Lots of great ideas on this thread. I should have consulted the FR Brain Trust a few months ago when I needed to convert a bunch of 8mm old movies to digital format. After messing with this for quite awhile and spending lots of money on new toys (Sony DVR, Adobe Premiere and Firewire card), I didn't achieve the desired quality. I eventually farmed it out to a commercial house with a Telecine unit to have them converted to DVD.

If any of you have any tricks for this particular problem, I would love to hear them as I still have more to do.

[Mid-MI Student]

My biggest problem is getting a "pause" made between tracks so that the CD will have track numbers.

The best solution here is a software music editing program. I would look for some sort of shareware with an evaluation period so you can test how well the editing/ making new files works before you buy.

[SamAdams76]

Thanks for starting this thread and importing my question from the other thread over here. Already some good info has been posted.

I've seen in Circuit City some CD-recorders as stereo components. That is, they plug into your stereo (not your computer) and record CDs from any audio source on your stereo. My take on them is that they weren't ready for prime-time. For example, it didn't look like you would have much control over the process. Does anybody have one and if so, how do you like it?

[agitator]

I edit audio digitally almost every day. You can use the Goldwave, it will do what you want to do. If you have the money and are technically inclined, get Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge and their Noise Reduction add-in. One of the reasons audio files on disk tend to be so much larger than what you download from the internet is the data rate that they're recorded at. Full CD quality stereo is recorded at a 44.1 khz, 16bit sampling rate or higher. You probably could get away with 22.050  @ 16bit from cassettes because unless they're really good cassettes (that lets out the cassettes that commercial music comes on...) AND you have a really good deck, the fidelity of the source material is going to suck anyway.

Even a $40 sound card will do a good job with audio cassettes as the noise from the cassette is much higher than the noise floor of a recent but cheapo sound card. Use a good quality cassette deck for the source, and keep an eye on the levels into your sound card. Make sure your hard drive is defragmented and that you have lots o room on it. Do a 60 sec recording of nothing and note the disk space it uses. Figure out how much run time you have on your hard drive from that and then leave at least half the drive space available for editing. Pump those cassettes in and out leaving a gap where the tapes start and stop until you run out of half of your drive space. At that point, go through the tunes one by one copying the particular track and then pasting it into a new file that you save.

If you have problems with an older sound card introducing noise, make sure that you don't have any drive cables rubbing on the sound card or that the video card isn't sitting right next to the video card.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

"My biggest problem is getting a "pause" made between tracks so that the CD will have track numbers. Yet many times, the songs flow uninterrupted on the original tape. I can manually pause the input between tracks but it's sort of a clunky way to do it. I'd like to get the entire tape on my hard drive as one large .wav file and then have the ability to separate them into smaller .wav files for track separation. Also, I can delete the commercials this way. If I cut the commercials, I should be able to fit most of my 90-minute tapes onto a 74 minute CD. Also there is DJ chatter in between the tracks but I'd like to keep it as they are discussing the music and that was part of the appeal of making all these tapes in the first place."

Try this website. GoldWave!

[DJ Frisat]

I see that there have been a lot of negative comments about recording through sound cards. My own experience is quite different, and I don't have exceptionally elaborate equipment -- a Crystal Sound integrated sound system on an HP motherboard, and a Sound Blaster Live card in my other computer. Either one of these is more than capable of producing a wav file indistinguishable from the original - especially when the original is an old audio tape. And with audio cleanup/EQ tools, they can sound even better!

One thing perhaps being overlooked is the sampling rate during recording. The de facto standard for "hi-fi" quality stereo and subsequent transfer to standard CD audio format is 16-bit, 44.1Khz.

If one side of a tape is recorded as a single wav file, it will need to be separated into individual files if you wish to have locatable "tracks" on the final CD. You need a wav editing program for this. I use Cool Edit 2000, a wonderful tool well worth the $69 price. Simply select the portion of the wav that you would like to be a CD track, and write it to a file. Then select the next portion of the wav, write it to a file, etc.

If you're using Adaptec/Roxio's EZ CD Creator to burn your CDs, select "Disc at Once" mode to eliminate the 2-second gap between tracks. The result will be a a CD which plays continuously as if it were one big wav, or will allow you to jump to a track, if you so desire.

[Grig]

Audio tape to CD is fairly simple, but for the best results you will need to invest some time.

First, you need a good soundcard with a sterio input. The microphone input that all cards have is MONO so you won't get a sterio digitization of your music using that.

Once you have that, it is fairly simple to get a cable that plugs into the soundcard and into the headphone jack of a quality tape player and record the audio. Make sure the recording software is set to record from the line-in jack you are using, not from another jack. (I use Creative Recorder, it came with my soundcard)

Some things to watch out for: 1) CD audio tracks are basicly .wav files that are 16 bit sterio, 44.1 KHz, so you want your recording software to record using that format for the best results. This means that your .wav files will be very large. 74 min of audio will take up 650M of disk space. 2) if the volume on the tape player is too loud, then you will wind up with a poor sounding recording. Some trial and error will be needed to find the right setting. If you record it a bit soft, you can normalize the audio up to a louder volume without harming the quality, but if you record it too loud you can't fix it after. Be carefull not to adjust the volume while recording is taking place.

I've never trusted software to figure out where the tracks go, it's better IMHO to manually cut each track off of the big .wav file into it's own .wav file. If you really want software to do this for you, I think EZ CD Creator will do this for you, even record and de-noise in realtime too. When you have a lot to do, it can at least be a good first step.

If you are going to take the time to cut and edit it yourself before burning, be sure to apply some noise reduction and normalization tools. Normalizing it means to adjust the volume of the whole track so the loudest part of the track is at some limit. You want to do this (using the same limit) to each track so that you don't have one song play real quiet (causing you to turn up the volume) and then have the next song blast your ears off.

If the songs crossfade into eachother, or if it's a concert where you get lots of applause between songs, you can use CD burning software like Nero that lets you adjust the pause length between tracks. A pause of zero seconds is allowed so you can still jump ahead to the next track, but there is no gap in the audio when played straight through.

[Nita Nupress]

Here's a software program that someone told me about (Was it you, Pardek?) that sounds like it may be useful in this application. I have no idea how well it will work for this, but someone here smarter than I could surely tell you. What I do know is that it's only $69!

Syntrillium Software: COOL EDIT 2000

Here's some more information about it from Harmony-Central.com, a well-known and respected site for reviews. Syntrillium Releases ProEQ Plug-In for Cool Edit 2000

I can't believe I'm lucky enough to find this thread. I signed on to check breaking news before going to bed and this thread popped up. Cool! Since I have tons of homemade cassettes that I'd like to convert to CD's, I will be bookmarking this thread to read later.

[Mr. Thorne]

Well, I managed with an audio Y-cable; one end into the headphone jack on my boombox, the other into the left/right plugs on the back of my PowerMac. That and a handy little program called SoundMaker 1.0.3 from MicroMat. Opened up SoundMaker, stuck the tape in, pushed play and off I went. There was a slight bit of 'tape noise', but SoundMaker took care of that.

I'm sure I'll get better with practice, but the first experience was fairly painless. The resulting MP3 file is here. Not perfect, but I've heard worse...

Though, truth to tell, for the amount of tape that y'all want to transfer to digital, I'm thinking there must be a better way. I'd be interested in hearing it myself.

= )

[scouse]

I would like to be able to put multiple tapes on each cd, as much as possible.

If I remember correctly the average song takes up about 3 to 3.5 MB. This is equivalent to about 3.5 mins. Each disk holds about 700 MBs.

[max61]

Philips, JVC, and Sony make audio system component CD burners that I am aware of. I purchased a JVC unit last year to perform the same basic function and have found it to be more than adequate to the task with decent quality and is no more difficult than operating a cassette deck used to be.

In addition to recording vinyl and cassette, I've also managed to capture DirectTV music channels, Digital Cable Music Channels, CDR's and reel-to-reel to CD. As well during the holidays I accidently recorded DTV channel 819 on my TiVo and managed to move music from the TiVo to CD burner. This actually has some interesting applications in combination with DirectTV.

I plan to record on the TiVo a 4-6 hours of Ch819 on DirectTV and then review the what's been recorded via fastforwarding the TiVo at 25x. Since the music is played on Ch.819 with the artist, album, song name displayed on the TV, I'll just record what I want on CD, then torch the rest. As well, since Ch.819 plays a fairly diverse selection of tunes, I'm bound to run into something I don't have already in one format or another sooner or later.

---max