HOME
TOPICS
SEARCH
ABOUT ME
MAIL

 
It's been fun, but it hasn't been easy.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
Making MP3 audio files from your old (and priceless) cassettes, Part 1


Jan. 22, 2006


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, The Post-Standard

   Cassette tapes are so 1970. About a year ago, I figured it was time to overhaul my music listening habits, so over the months since then I've been making digital copies of my treasured audio cassettes from the '60s through the early '80s.
    I knew from unhappy experience that some of my tapes won't be playable if I put off transferring them to digital form.
    As it gets old, tape gets brittle and its edges curl, pulling the magnetic surface away from the tape deck's playback head. Because dozens of my tapes are, literally, priceless &emdash;I have many live recordings from radio broadcasts and a lot of home studio tapes made when my brother Bob and I were amateur audio engineers &emdash;I knew I had to rescue the most important cassettes while they were still playable.
    It's been fun, but it hasn't been easy.
    This week and next, I'll share my project with you and tell you how I did it and what I've learned. I'll explain the steps I took in getting my analog music and voice recordings into digital form, and I'll tell you which software programs worked best.
   To convert old-fashioned analog tape recordings to modern digital audio files, you need four things &emdash;a music source, a signal conversion device, good recording software and a computer that can record digital audio. You also might need software that can convert one kind of digital audio to another kind if your recording program isn't able to do that.
   Music source: I have a well maintained Denon high-fidelity cassette deck I bought about 10 years ago. It is ideal for this project, having separate record and playback tape heads, giving it a better chance of extracting music from fading magnetic tape. It also has dual capstans to pull the tape evenly across the playback head.
   Signal conversion device: I used an outboard USB device from ADS Tech called Instant Music. I plugged the cassette deck's audio output cables into the Instant Music device and got high-fidelity stereo digital audio out through the USB port. There are no controls to mess up. It simply works &emdash;with both Windows and Apple Macintoshes. (I used my Apple OS X Mac for most of my recording.)
    For more on the ADS Tech device, read my review at www.technofileonline.com/texts/tec071705.html.
   Recording software: I use Audio Hijack Pro on my OS X Mac and Sound Forge on my Windows PC. Audio Hijack Pro is incomparable in being able to record from any source at any time, even while you are away, and is one reason I prefer to record on my OS X Mac. (The other main reason is the complete absence of viruses and spyware for OS X, which allows me to record and convert the audio simultaneously, without devoting any processor time to anti-spyware and anti-virus efforts.)
   But Sound Forge is superb in its own way; it makes other Windows recording software look pedestrian. For more on Audio Hijack Pro, go to www.rogueamoeba.com. Sound Forge information is at www.sonymediasoftware.com.
   Conversion software: I used Audio Hijack Pro on OS X (it does conversions on the fly, while recording) and Blaze Media Pro on Windows.
   Blaze Media Pro deserves to be better known, not only for the quality and variety of its conversions &emdash;it's the best in the Windows arena, by far &emdash;but also for its spectacular customer support. I got helpful, live replies even in the middle of the night.
   Next: How I edited and converted my analog music to MP3 digital audio, and the surprising lessons I learned along the way.