Got a friend wanting to know whether he can plug a cable from the headphone mini-jack on a Cassette Walkman to a sound card line-in (also mini) to capture cassette tapes to .mp3. My gut feeling is this wouldn't be a good idea, as it probably wouldn't be the correct levels or something, and I'm afraid of damaging hardware. Can anyone confirm this would not be advisable? (I would also suspect the audio output from a walkman would be inferior to cassette players designed for the home but unless it's a huge difference he's not going to care). I've done cassette tape capture before, using a full-sized stereo unit's RCA to mini-plug converter cable to get it to the sound card, but I'm not sure he's got that stuff. Is that the only way to go here?
Yes, this is possible. It won't harm your system. You need a cable called an attenuating cable and you plug one end to your tape deck and the other end to your line-in of your sound card. Then you use a program called Musicmatch, which you then use by recording the content of the tape onto your computer. The only complicated part about it is timing the playing of the cassete deck to the simultaneous pressing of the record button on Musicmatch. Musicmatch will record the content as an mp3. Pretty simple.
Ideally you would have a line out on your cassette player, if not just make sure the volume isn't at max. I've never used MusicMatch to do it but any wav recorder can do the same thing. I use Sound Forge. It's really pretty easy.
urgh. Let's take sound off a poor, hissy reproduction medium, into the digital domain, then chop the high end off by compressing it. Fine for family momentoes and "irreplacables," but that would be the extent of it...
I've done this before and used SoundForge to record/edit/etc... You can remove the hiss and various other imperfections ~ it's great to save a favorite old album.
Great info about the cable there, thanks. He has Creative, so he might already be able to record to mp3, but it's also good to know that Musicmatch will as well in case this is an older product.
No argument, I hate all tape medium. Hence, kinda why we're moving it out of the tape realm. One of my 70's tapes snapped when I hit "Play" while transferring it to mp3. As for chopping off the high end, when I save mp3's, I sometimes increase the max freq range a bit and increase the bitrate accordingly, depending on the material. I know mp3 is not the best format. If car players ever support another non-DRM format, I'll make the switchover.
I did this. I once borrowed the MULAN cassette from a teacher and now my girls have a CD of the soundtrack.
Thanks - I'll look into that. I use CoolEdit myself, but that's discontinued and I'm not about to have my brother pay ridiculous sums for Audition. Maybe he won't need to edit, but this is good to know.
There's another app called Rip Vinyal that will not only record the cassette tape but it'll detect the silences between songs and automatically create multiple tracks. It worked pretty good for me. I used it to copy some crappy audio book for work but I wanted to listen to it on my Palm...rather than a crapp cassette tape.
I still use cooledit, theres nothing wrong with it. what you shoud do is just record the whole tape and seperate the tracks within cool.
