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I have many audio cassettes, many of which I can't find modern digital versions of, which I would like to import to my iTunes. I've seen ads for (fairly cheap, mostly) devices which are meant to do this. Some reviews caution that quality can vary. I'd like to know if someone with experience in doing this has any recommendations or success stories. Thanks.
I did this years ago and I guess one thing you need to do is find a balance between quality and effort. I know I can no longer hear things above a certain frequency so there is no point in my trying to make hi-fi renditions. When I did mine years ago I would spend a lot of time using tools to remove every single bit of hiss and pop from a track, but I would end up taking half an hour for a single track. Not sure if I would bother with that now.
Don't forget many cassettes have Dolby Noise Reduction so you may want to make sure your player has that too, or you may wish to filter your files.
I guess the main thing is if you use some kind of digital adapter from your source to your computer you check its frequency range. I suspect many of them are fine but are really intended for modest quality work such as spoken word.
You can ask about that here but the one thing I didn't use was iTunes. I used Audacity and various other programs that probably no longer exist and certainly don't for Windows. I suspect many of their features are present in current versions of Audacity, but not 14 year ago. :-)
I did this years ago and I guess one thing you need to do is find a balance between quality and effort. I know I can no longer hear things above a certain frequency so there is no point in my trying to make hi-fi renditions. When I did mine years ago I would spend a lot of time using tools to remove every single bit of hiss and pop from a track, but I would end up taking half an hour for a single track. Not sure if I would bother with that now.
Don't forget many cassettes have Dolby Noise Reduction so you may want to make sure your player has that too, or you may wish to filter your files.
I guess the main thing is if you use some kind of digital adapter from your source to your computer you check its frequency range. I suspect many of them are fine but are really intended for modest quality work such as spoken word.
You can ask about that here but the one thing I didn't use was iTunes. I used Audacity and various other programs that probably no longer exist and certainly don't for Windows. I suspect many of their features are present in current versions of Audacity, but not 14 year ago. :-)
Thanks, that is helpful. Some of the stuff you mention is definitely over my head. I'm especially interested in what apparatus people use for this process. The ones I've seen seem to be either in the 25 to 30 dollar range or in the 140 to 160 dollar range. Most mention that it makes an mp3 file, which I've heard of but don't exactly know how to put into iTunes. But I can probably figure that out or get some twelve-year old to show me. Someone in a review of one device complained that it went directly to iTunes, whereas they apparently wanted some other result. Maybe I should try to find that one again...
I had a very different computer back when I did this, and I I have only ever used Macs so I can't really help you with Windows. Back then I had a soundcard that accepted RCA jacks and I just plugged in my stereo setup cassette player, pressed the play button on the recorder and then pressed the record button on the software I was using. I'd do a whole side, then use software to break it up into individual tracks and literally eyeball pops and squeaks and interpolate between them. You can get software that kind of does all that for you now, to the extent that you trust it to do it correctly. I really haven't bothered keeping track of changes in the 15 years since I di this and of course everything I did was on a Mac, sorry. I know modern Macs don't have sound input ports anymore and I bought a $7 USB digital input device which if I needed to do this again would let me take headphone output from my stereo and plug it into a microphone input on this dongle plugged into a USB port. Of course the thing is designed for speaking into a microphone so it probably has a limited frequency range.
I know on Macs some software packages that do this kind of thing have an option (which makes me think your friends aren't checking things fully) to send to iTunes. Since I did this entirely outside of iTunes it didn't get added until I had my final product and I dragged the files to iTunes.
iTunes itself has no recording capability. It is a media player, not a recorder or editor.
cassettes to digital
