old tapes to CD

[Adcadet]

hey crew,
my father-in-law wants to convert his old tapes to CD. He says it's worth $200 to him. Anybody know an easy way to do this? Are there places that will do it for him?

 

[sechs]

There are places that will do it... but probably not his whole collection for $200.

This is an easy do-it-yourself, if you have appropriate hardware and software.

 

[Handruin]

Polderbits

2 week unrestricted trial...

Edit new files recorded with the Sound Recorder, or open and edit existing WAV and mp3 files.
Automatically or manually split up recordings, like a full recording of one LP side into multiple tracks.
Trim the start and end of each track – cut out white noise and save space.
Each track can be faded in or out at the desired point, allowing you to neatly separate tracks that run over into each other, like a live recording with applause, or even shorten a song that’s too long.
Cut out fragments of sound from within the middle of a track.
Listen to the result of your editing before saving it to disk.
Recordings can be saved to disk as a standard WAV or mp3 sound file, with your choice of desired sound quality.

 

[mubs]

Been wanting to do something like this myself, for a long time. I've done a couple, hooking up a cassette deck to my sound card. It is a painfully long, laborious, manual process.

I wish there was a stand-alone unit with a cassette well and an integrated cd-burner. Pop in the cassette, a blank cd, and you end up with a correctly converted cd. Would be nice if the unit digitized to a bult-in HDD first, then applied the options you select - volume levelling, hiss removal, etc. Adcadet's pop-in-law's budget is a reasonabke amount for a m/c like this, considering it's mostly going to be a one-time affair.

 

[Mercutio]

Nero has a pretty darn good audio editor. Record the whole thing as one long file and then put your tracks in after the fact. Takes about 2 minutes, 'cause you can see right where the breaks are.

 

[time]

CD-Wave

 

[Howell]

Gary recommended Goldwave at one time. It worked well the one time I tried it. Don't know if this is common but you can set the record-time so you can go off and do other things.

 

[Corvair]

Goldwave V5.08 is plenty adequate for the casual editing job, but some may find that Goldwave's US$50 Multiquence multi-track editor (only costs US$7.00 more that regular Goldwave) gives them exactly what they want with the ability to mix between sets of stereo tracks.

http://www.goldwave.com/

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As for doing analogue (or digital) transfers, I normally use my Alesis MasterLink 9600 CD mastering recorder. These aren't priced for Joe Sixpack, nor would Joe Sixpack want to wade through the MasterLink's editing facilities.

Of interest here, the ML9600 has both balanced and unbalance analogue inputs talking to ultra-quality A/D converters. The ML-9600 converts and records the real-time sessions to digital on an internal hard drive. Then, you use the built-in editing facilities to perform fades and P/Q track information (i.e. -- controlling the readout display of the CD player when you play the CD). Once you have completed the editing (everything's still stored on the internal hard drive), you write the master disc.

I can do the same thing on my audio workstation (computer) using my LynxStudio LynxONE soundcard and using Sony Pictures (nee Sonic Foundry) CD Architect and finally writing the master CD on a Yamaha CRW-F1. By the way, neither the LynxONE soundcard nor CD Architect are priced for Joe Sixpack.

 

[mubs]