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Know Jesus Fully: Converting Tapes to MP3's
| By
Tim Uhl |
Unfortunately, converting
cassettes to digital is time consuming.
You will probably find it prohibitively
expensive to have someone else do it. It
has to be done at actual speed. It is not
difficult to convert with a computer.
The
general procedure is:
1) Use the best tape
deck you can get your hands on.
2) Use
a computer with a good quality, low noise,
sound card with stereo line inputs.
3)
While playing the tape, capture the audio
to a wav file(s) using the highest possible
output volume (without clipping). I have
used Audiograbber, which is free. http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/
4)
After capturing, apply any noise reduction
filters you might need. In my experience,
these distort the signal and don't help
very much. I have tried a clean-up filter
from Algorithmix: http://www.algorithmix.com/ I
had some tapes I converted to digital,
and in the end, it sounded best just leaving
the tape artifacts in the recording and
not applying any filtering.
5) Edit/split/merge
the wav file(s) as necessary. There are
many freeware programs to do this.
6) Burn
wav files to a CD using most any CD burning
software (if needed).
7) The final step
is to convert the CD (or wav files directly)
to MP3 format. I have used audiograbber
for this.
8) After the MP3 files are created,
you will probably want to edit the MP3
tags so the correct speaker, title, etc.
show up in the MP3 player. I recommend
MP3 Tag Tools, which is free: http://massid3lib.sourceforge.net/
Another
very good option is to use a standalone
CD recorder instead of a computer. Just
run the output of the tape deck into the
CD recorder. The recorder will have a low
noise front end and it can even adjust
volume automatically and optionally add
automatic tracks every 3 minutes if you
want. The resulting CD can still be edited
on the computer. I think I personally would
use a CD (or even DVD) recorder instead
of a computer to digitally capture the
audio. I don't think they are very expensive
anymore. Unless you have a really good
sound capture card (not on the motherboard),
computers can be notoriously noisy.
I'm
not sure if any of this helps, but please
let me know if I can provide any more info. |
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