HOME
TOPICS
ABOUT ME
MAIL

 
Turn those cassette recordings into MP3s.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
ADS Tech 'Instant Music' converter can make MP3s out of your old music collection


July 17, 2005


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard

   The version of this week's column published in The Post-Standard was cut short because of a transmission error. The full text is included here.
   
   Cassette tapes are so last century. Playing them is a drag, and you can't make playlists or skip right to the middle or end of a song.
   Ah, but you can, indeed -- if you turn those cassette recordings into MP3s.
   That's the project I started a few weeks ago using a new computer audio accessory from ADS Tech. It's called Instant Music. You plug it into a USB port and connect your cassette deck to it through clearly marked cable jacks.
   To create an MP3 out of the music on the cassette, you simply press the "Play" button on the tape recorder and click the "Record" button on your computer's software.
   Instant Music, which is not much bigger than a bar of bath soap, works on both Windows PCs and Apple Macintoshes. It costs $60. You can buy it at computer stores or directly from the company's Web site, www.adstech.com.
   Instant Music comes with audio recording software for Windows. If you have an Apple Macintosh, you can use Apple's GarageBand audio software or any other OS X recording program. Instant Music should also work on modern Linux computers, but I did not try it on Linux.
   I did my cassette conversions on my Apple OS X computer using Audio Hijack Pro. (A recent review of Audio Hijack Pro is at http://technofileonline/texts/mac062905.html.) If I had been using Windows, I could have used the Windows recording software included on a CD with Instant Music or any other full-featured Windows audio-recording software.
   I have a lot of old cassette tapes. Some even date from the year the audio cassette was invented, 1963, but most are from the 1970s. The ones I have been transferring to digital format include a large collection of commercially recorded Dolby B, Dolby C and dbx cassettes and many personal recordings of my brother Bob and I singing and playing guitar. (He's a real songwriter, but I'm a plunker.
   Needless to say, those personal recordings are priceless and irreplaceable. Converting them to digital form now, before the tapes become unplayable from age and mildew, has turned out to be an important project.
   Instant Music turned out to be wonderfully simple to use. After connecting it to a USB port (either USB 1.1 or 2.0), you connect your tape deck to Instant Music through standard hi-fi cables. You then start up your audio recording software, play a section of a tape to set the optimum recording levels, wind the tape back and start the recording just before you press Play on the tape deck.
   I did a multi-step procedure, capturing to a lossless audio format first so I could edit the recording, then storing the edited lossless version on disk. After that I made an MP3 copy of the edited recording. You could simplify this by recording directly to MP3 if you'd rather do it with less fuss.
   Audio quality was very good. Instant Music's specifications are first rate, and the digital transfers I made sounded exactly the same as the originals. Because Instant Music is an external USB device, it will work with any recording software and it can be moved from one computer to another easily.