Digital Media Convert

I am pretty sure you still have music stored in an audio cassette tape. If you don’t your parents or your grand parents might still have it. This guide will give you an explanation of what you need to convert your music stored in audio cassette tape into digital format.

By converting your audio cassette into digital format you will get the benefit in maintenance. Audio cassette is hard to maintain, it’s fragile and very sensitive to dust and humidity. Once your tape get sucked by your tape player mechanical machine, you will not be able to restore the clarity of the original sound.

Thanks to the world of digital. Now you can store your music in hard drive and compact disc for longer lifetime until your hard drive or your compact disc fails but surely it will take way longer than audio cassette.

To perform the converting, you’ll need a cassette tape player with a headphone jack, a computer with a soundcard, a male-male stereo audio cable and a recording software. We recommend you to use the free “Audacity” software.

OK lets get started.

Plug one end of your male-male stereo audio cable into the tape player and the other end into the line-in port of your soundcard. Please note: Don’t plug the cable into your mic-in port of your soundcard whenever possible because if you set the tape player volume too high, it can damage the mic-in hardware interface.

Run Audacity. Navigate to the [Edit] menu, then [Preferences]. Use the “Device” selector to pick your input device (usually will be automatically detected), and change the “Channels” selector to pick from mono or stereo recording. Press the [Record] button (red circle) then play

your cassette player to start recording and you can stop recording at anytime by pressing the [Stop] button.

Saving Recorded Auido File.

You can choose between [Export As WAV], [Export As Mp3] or [Export As Ogg] format from the [File] menu. WAV and Ogg already included as the built-in library but to export as Mp3, Audacity will prompt you to locate the Lame Encoder Library. You can do a file search using “lame*.dll” keyword to check if you already have it, if not you can download it from Lame website.

TIPS:

When you record, make sure you don’t set the cassette player volume and the Line Input volume too high to prevent level overload. You may need to adjust the proper volume setting first with test record. When you perform the test record notice the level indicator (red bar top right). Make sure the peak level is not lower than 75% and not higher than 90% to get a better sound - not too loud but still get the detail.

Most soundcard have more input interfaces. Mute them all except the Line-In interface to prevent possible noise. Enjoy…