Connecting audio cassette deck to sound card

[jeffgson]

Simple enough question, I would think.

I have 10 hours of audio cassette tapes, and I would like to store some of it to my hard drive, edit it, and perhaps save it to CD.

I have a cassette deck with a headphone jack - it takes the same type of headphone connector as a "Walkman" type player. Is there a connector that can plug into my cassette deck on one end, and into the input socket of my soundcard on the other end? It seems the quality would be so much better than buying a microphone and putting it in front of the tape deck speakers, then playing back the cassette.

 

[nealh]

great question...

 

[taxi]

A headphone jack to headphone jack cable is all you need. I have done this several times.

 

[nealh]

Radio shack would have this correct?

BTW how is the quality..as good as the casette it comes from...

BTW is special software needed for recording and playback...or burning to cd

 

[corkyg]

Most tape decks come with female RCA plugs - L and R. Your sound card LINE IN port is a female stereo mini-jack. Just get an audio patch cable with a pair of mail RCAs on one end and a stereo mini-jack (male) on the other. That is your link.

Then in order to store your stapes on your HDD, you need to convert them from analog to video - either WAV or WMA or MP3. For that you need CD recording software that has that capability. I have converted hundreds of analog casette tapes and reel-to-reel tapes to CDRs using that connection.

ECDC has always been good for that - Nero has always ignored it until just recently.

You are better off using the tape deck's line out RCA ports rather than the headphone jack because the latter is amplified and volume sensitive whereas the LINE OUT and LINE are at pre-amp level and not subject to audio distortion from an amplifier.

 

[Sheriff]

Good advice corky-g as that's exactly how I do it with the Audigy Software and recently enjoying TsunamiPro 😉

 

[nealh]

to record the audio..you plug it in..play the cassette..and record with soundcard..then convert the file to .wav?

 

[LED]

Originally posted by: nealh
to record the audio..you plug it in..play the cassette..and record with soundcard..then convert the file to .wav?

Depends on which software encoding you pick because you chose the way to render the Tape. From my experience when going with MP3, although smaller files are achieved, it usually comes out averaging 80kbps so I go with the larger 24bit Wav Files 1st and then do what I want with them...(ie WMV, MP3)

 

[ScrapSilicon]

Originally posted by: LED

Originally posted by: nealh
to record the audio..you plug it in..play the cassette..and record with soundcard..then convert the file to .wav?

Depends on which software encoding you pick because you chose the way to render the Tape. From my experience when going with MP3, although smaller files are achieved, it usually comes out averaging 80kbps so I go with the larger 24bit Wav Files 1st and then do what I want with them...(ie WMV, MP3)

I use TotalRecorder($12 proggie) after tossing lame and blade in the equation can turn reg cassette tape audio into vbr mp3 ..also use it to record xmradio every so often 😉 ..1/8"male to 1/8" male ..RadioShack has that and 1/8" male to R/L female RCA ..🙂

 

[EvanAdams]

I have a tape deck (like you'd put in a HT setup) I use the line out and the decks own amp function for when I'm recording from mp3 to tape.

 

[nealh]

if I chose .wav file to play in a cd player with no mp3 function..how would I do the encode...

I real need a step by step please..thanks

 

[jackschmittusa]

Choose ".wav" format for your recording format. In what ever you use to burn, you should choose ".cda" as the output format. .cda is the standard cd audio format that all players use.

 

[nealh]

thanks I am going to give it a go this weekend...