i have a cassette tape deck that i can hook to my sound blaster live sound card but need to know what kind of software to use and or a guide i have about 60 tapes that i would like to convert for life span reasons any help would be great
Acoustica MP3 ... - I don't know the software but if you want to create audio CDs, using mp3 (as the name of the software suggests) is useless.
Better record to uncompressed .wav (and use lossless compression like flac or monkey's audio if you've got a space problem).
I've recorded tape to CD before like this:
1. Use messer for recording. It has an autostart/stop feature depending on measured volume that can be also used to find track start postitions and create separate files automatically. There are several other programs that could do the recording job, e.g. Audiograbber or foobar2000 with linein plugin.
2. Use CoolEditPro (now Adobe Audition, free timelimited trial version available AFAIK; a free but limited alternative is Audacity) to perform noise removal if necessary and to remove problems like 50/60Hz power supply related tones. Of course several other things can be done too like equalizing, dynamics compression, volume change, click removal etc. It can be used to cut to separate tracks but I prefer to do it like this:
3. Create a .cue file using notepad: Take an existing .cue (create it e.g. by ripping an audio CD with EAC to single .wav + .cue), open it with notepad and edit it according to track starting points determined with CoolEdit/Audition. Note that a 2 seconds pre-track gap before the 1st track of a CD is required, so you might have to append up to 2 seconds of silence in the beginning of the 1st track. The .cue has to be in the same directory as the .wav. Load the .cue (drag'n'drop) into foobar2000. Here it works like a playlist and you can check if everything is alright (you can start playback of single tracks at correct positions etc.)
4. If everything is fine use Burrrn to burn to CD (drag'n'drop the .cue) or if you have Nero installed, you can use foobar2000 with foo_burninate component to do the job (it uses Nero burning engine)
One important remark: CD-Rs don't last forever. After 5 years (decent storage conditions) there'll be read errors (or worse) with majority of CD-Rs, some even start dying after ~ 1 year. You might want to look into alternative storage (additionally) like a separate HDD + lossless compression (for 60 Tapes á 90 minutes a 40 GB HDD should be enough.)
hey, not to go against a mod or anything but this software tis excellent and works just fine (Ps acoustica also has a MP3 WMA and WAV Converter program these four programs are ideal
@ -LoNeR-:
As I said, I don't know the software, I guess in spite of its name you can choose if mp3 or wav is used for storage - I just wanted to point out that going through a lossy compression step (i.e. using mp3) when doing Tape -> CD backup is no good. You throw away data and degrade quality without a reason. Even if you don't hear it now, maybe you want to create mp3s from the CD-Rs later - then you'll get transcoding artifacts. Or you want to apply some processing later like noise reduction - lossy compression throws away the headroom necessary for this resulting in audible artifacts.
I've used Nero's Wave Editor with excellent results. The software is fast and very accurate. Editing couldn't be any easy and you can copy, paste, insert other audio into your projects. A definite 5 star piece of software. The cleanup tools are pretty good too!
Quote:3. Create a .cue file using notepad: Take an existing .cue (create it e.g. by ripping an audio CD with EAC to single .wav + .cue), open it with notepad and edit it according to track starting points determined with CoolEdit/Audition.
Would you be kind enough to elaborate how would you make CoolEdit determine the starting point of each track in one huge WAV file of say 12 tracks? Is this where the "Auto Cue" feature of CoolEdit comes in? You can also split it manually though. Like CDwave, it should split in sector boundaries.
I would like to try a method that is less tedious and reliable that could save me time converting my LP's and Tapes. Thanks...
