How to convert from Audiotape or records to CD

[Taino]

What is the most clean method to record my audio tapes and records onto my computer to then make an audio CD? I have sound blaster live card installed in my computer. What the easiest software to use?

 

[GigaCluster]

If you are using Windows, I recommend GoldWave. Set it for unbounded recording.

Get a male-male (or whatever the official term for that is) cable, one end of which will plug into the Headphones jack of your best tape player (best for best audio extraction quality) and the other end will go into the LINE IN (not the MIC IN!!!) jack of your sound card. If all goes well, GoldWave should now respond to sound coming in.

After recording, save it. If you are okay with MP3, then just use GoldWave's built-in MP3 converter, but if you want to save it to Ogg Vorbis format (which I strongly recommend due to its superior compression and open-source-ness), you can download a special plugin at that same web site.


P.S. The reason you don't want to plug in the cable into the MIC IN jack of your sound card is that you will get A LOT of noise in the short pauses of your music. This is what I did before I knew better -- had to re-record several tapes.
Good luck.

 

[Bleep]

If you are unfortunate enough to have onboard sound that you are using and have to plug into the Mike jack just take out the noise with the noise gate feature of goldwave. I only record one song at a time using the Que feature of my tape deck, I then trim both ends and run it through whatever filter it needs. Goldwave is a excellent program for the money, it will take you about a good evening to learn it.
Bleep

 

[Goi]

The cleanest? Dump your soundblaster, get a M-Audio Audiophile 2496 audio card, connect the analog input of that to the analog output of the best cassette tape player you can lay your hands on, record via that connection using CoolEdit at 24bit/96KHz or any other software supporting that PCM format. Then, burn those wav files onto a CD with Nero or other burning software.

 

[GigaCluster]

If you plan to do this a lot or the quality of sound is VERY important to you, you may want to look into getting a tape player with digital out and a sound card with digital in. This will prevent the physical transfer of your music from being a quality-reducing factor.

Also, sorry I mentioned compression -- I missed the fact that you want it on the CD. For that, save it as a low-quality PCM (.wav) file. Low-quality because the quality of your tape is low enough to where the settings that Goi mentioned should be reasonable. Once you do that, just burn it with the burning software of your choice.

You don't want to use compression at all, because that'll be a major quality-reducing and time-consuming factor -- you would spend a lot of time encoding a sound file of that size, remove a lot of data from the sound file needlessly, and then your CD burning software would just have to decode it back into lower-quality PCM format in order to burn it as an Audio CD.

 

[hoihtah]

Originally posted by: Goi
The cleanest? Dump your soundblaster, get a M-Audio Audiophile 2496 audio card, connect the analog input of that to the analog output of the best cassette tape player you can lay your hands on, record via that connection using CoolEdit at 24bit/96KHz or any other software supporting that PCM format. Then, burn those wav files onto a CD with Nero or other burning software.

how are you going to suggest that he upgrades to 2496... and then recommend cooledit for software?

that's such an odd suggestion.

 

[GigaCluster]

16 bits or less should be enough... and a sample rate of 22,050 Hz would be good.
Sorry, I did not look that closely at Goi's suggestion before recommending it.

 

[Goi]

Well, he could go with Pro Tools of course, but that would be too expensive I guess. Its in the 4 digit range, and CoolEdit Pro is a pretty good sound editing software for beginners to semi pro people. I'm using 2.0 myself. Goldwave doesn't compare. BTW, I'm suggesting CoolEdit Pro, not CoolEdit, there's quite a big difference between the 2.

GigaCluster, I wasn't aware that cassette tape players had digital outputs. I guess I'm not in the loop with tape players. Anyway, tape is an analog format, so with a tape player with digital out, you'd be doing the conversion in the tape player, while with a soundcard you'd be doing it in the computer. All other things being equal, the former would probably sound better, but it also depends on the quality of the ADC. Also, he wanted cleanest, so assuming he has enough disk space, why not go excessive with 24bit/96KHz?

 

[PliotronX]

why not go excessive with 24bit/96KHz?

Because he plans on getting the material onto CDs which would require downsampling and would be just one more needless step that wouldn't help any. I would suggest a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card for clean analog input in what is needed here (16/44).

You're right about the tape decks, I haven't seen any of them with digital outputs as they aren't such a medium that would require digital hookups. There might be a few, but it's an added cost that wouldn't warrant the pricetag IMO.

 

[Goi]

Well, there are several merits of handling signals in a higher quality format before downsampling them, rather than work with the native format. Many CD players, receivers and processors deal with 24/96 or even 24/192 signals before going into the DAC. Upsampling any audio signal will bring usually about an improvement in sound, by increasing SNR. If you use your CD format as a 16bit/44.1KHz format argument, then there'd be no need for upsamplers or 18-24bit DACs sampling at anything 48/96/192KHz...