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I used the timed recording function in Audio Hijack Pro.
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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 2
Jan. 29, 2006
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, The Post-Standard
MP3s are much easier to play than cassette tapes. You can listen to them on your computer or on your iPod. Your DVD player, if it's a fairly new one, probably can play them, too, if you stick the files on a CD.
But the best thing about MP3s, especially to longtime audio nuts like me, is that they'll never jam or wear out --something you could never say about the cassettes you left on the rear-window shelf of your car all summer.
So after realizing last year that some of my priceless home-recorded cassettes had become unplayable after 30 or more years of storage, I started aÊlong-term project to convert the music on my tapes to MP3 files. MP3s can be stored, copied and played easily Ê-- after all, they're just computer files -- and I knew that if I did the conversions carefully, I'd end up with MP3s that sounded just as good as my original tapes.
The conversions themselves, asÊI reported last week, have been easy. (You'll find that column in my archives, which store all my newspaper articles, atÊwww.technofileonline.com/texts/tec012206.htm.) But the hard part came when I realized many of my new music files had to be tweaked in one way or another. I'll tell you how I solved that problem this week.
In a perfect world, I would have been able to click something on your computer and press a button on your tape deck and watch as my analog audio got converted to digital sound.
In real life, however, I had three problems:
1. If I wanted the recording from my tape deck to my computer to stop at exactly the right moment, I'd have to sit at the computer during each transfer and click "Stop" at the exact time. Fat chance of that happening! I've got a life, so I needed another way. (In fact, I found two ways. Stay tuned.)
2. Many tapes were louder than normal and many others were quieter than they should have been, A lot of others sounded like they'd lost all their highs and lows. Their audio response needed to be boosted.
3. I had some really long recordings that were split onto two tapes. It would have been silly to keep them split up when I turned them into digital audio, so I had to combine those MP3s after I transferred them.
Now for the solutions.
1. I wasn't able to get my MP3 recordings to end when the tapes ended, so I used the timed recording function in Audio Hijack Pro to turn the computer's MP3 recordings off after a reasonable amount of time. In other words, if I was making MP3 transfers of a C90 cassette tape, I'd set the timer to stop recording after 47 minutes. (C-90s are supposed to play for 45 minutes a side, but most of them have a little extra tape and play longer.)Ê
Audio Hijack Pro, as I mentioned last week, is an extraordinary audio recording program for OS X. Timed recordingÊ is only one of its amazing functions. If you use Windows, you could do this sort of thing manually by setting a kitchen timer for 47 minutes (or for any other tape-side length), so it would alert you to attend to the transfer.
All the MP3s I made using this method had a few minutes of silence at the end, so I trimmed the silent passages using MP3 Trimmer on OS X and, to make sure there was a Windows program that would do the same thing, using MP3DirectCut under Windows 2000. Both are able to do something that's quite unusual: They can edit MP3 files without re-encoding them and therefore without causing any loss of quality.
Get MP3 Trimmer ($11) from http://deepniner.net/mp3trimmer or MP3DirectCut (no cost) from www.mpesch3.de.
2. Tapes that were louder than normal needed to be auditioned carefully before I could transfer them to MP3. The problem? Digital audio has an absolute limit on the loudest sounds that can be recorded, and any sounds that are louder than that limit cause horrible breakups in the audio. So I simply had to listen to the loudest passages and set my volume levels accordingly. This often took a lot of time.
I was able to cheat for tapes that were quieter than usual. I simply "normalized" the digital file in my sound editor. ("Normalizing" brings the overall sound volume up to a higher level.)
3. I combined most of my multipart MP3 files using MP3 Trimmer. MP3DirectCut worked fine, too. Standard audio editors can't combine MP3s without decoding them into WAVs or AIFFs, joining them and then reencoding the audio. This reduces the sound quality and takes much longer.
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