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What is the best home pc program to record cassette tapes and phonograph records to a CD?

January 16th, 2010 by admin

I am a teacher and have a number of excerpts and teacher tape cassette tapes I would like to preserve as teaching aids as they are not readily available on CD and are not likely to be. Your experience would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Put simply, you will need to connect your cassette player to your PC soundcard, then play the cassette whilst recording on your PC. A step-by-step guide is available at:
http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/DIY/index.php
(follow the link to ‘Cassette to CD‘)
The recording software is the key, there are some free software downloads available at:
http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/downloads.php
I have used ‘Magix Audio Cleaning Lab’ and ‘Audacity’ – Audacity is particularly popular since it is free!
If you record to WAV format, expect file sizes of around 10MB per minute, or 1MB per minute for MP3 (at 128kbps).
Once you have your digital versions of the recording on your PC, simply burn them on to a CD (Nero burning software or similar..). If you use Magix Audio Cleaning, the software will burn an audio CD for you without needing additional software (assuming you have a CD writing drive of course!)
You will need the additional ‘lame_enc.dll’ file to export into MP3 – this can also be downloaded from the free software page.
You can also download a free PDF version of the step-by–step guide from the download page mentioned above, the guide is complete with diagrams and screen-shots.
Hope this helps (if you like the online guide, don’t forget to ‘DIGG’ it….)

3 Responses to “What is the best home pc program to record cassette tapes and phonograph records to a CD?”

  1. #1
    Lord Soth
    January 16th, 2010 8:33 am

    Goldwave. It has statistical noise filtering to remove the hissing sound on old casettes which can be activated and variable bitrate MP3 save option.
    References :

  2. #2
    Bingobango
    January 16th, 2010 8:46 am

    If there is a headphone socket on your cassette player then it’s easy. You will need a cable with a stereo jack plug (3.5mm) at each end. You will also need a recording programme, I use audiograbber which is a free download. Then plug the cable into the headphone socket on the tape, and the line in socket behind your computer. Start Audograbber and under file select line in sampling. Start off with the tape volume fairly low and adjust till the recording levels are OK just to test. Then simply record to your computer. If you wish to convert to MP3 you will need an encoder, the instructions for downloading this are in Audiograbber. Hope this helps.
    References :

  3. #3
    soundman_jaybee
    January 16th, 2010 9:15 am

    Put simply, you will need to connect your cassette player to your PC soundcard, then play the cassette whilst recording on your PC. A step-by-step guide is available at:
    http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/DIY/index.php
    (follow the link to ‘Cassette to CD‘)
    The recording software is the key, there are some free software downloads available at:
    http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/downloads.php
    I have used ‘Magix Audio Cleaning Lab’ and ‘Audacity’ – Audacity is particularly popular since it is free!
    If you record to WAV format, expect file sizes of around 10MB per minute, or 1MB per minute for MP3 (at 128kbps).
    Once you have your digital versions of the recording on your PC, simply burn them on to a CD (Nero burning software or similar..). If you use Magix Audio Cleaning, the software will burn an audio CD for you without needing additional software (assuming you have a CD writing drive of course!)
    You will need the additional ‘lame_enc.dll’ file to export into MP3 – this can also be downloaded from the free software page.
    You can also download a free PDF version of the step-by–step guide from the download page mentioned above, the guide is complete with diagrams and screen-shots.
    Hope this helps (if you like the online guide, don’t forget to ‘DIGG’ it….)
    References :
    http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk

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