Converting cassette tapes

Plusdeck 2 is a great gadget. Kind of pricey, but works great, if its worth the money to you.

You can feed the signal into your computer through the [b]Line In Jack[/b] on the sound card and save the music as a .WAV file. Your CD/DVD Recording software should have some utilities to cleanup any noise on the input and allow you to do this without too much trouble. Then from there you can either burn to CD/DVD or rip to MP3 through Media Player or some other Ripping software although Media Player will be defiantly on your computer so you will not require any different software to do this.

You'll need a Cassette Player to read from and a lad to feed the Line IN so depending on the player being used you may require a pair of RCA plugs to a 3.5 MM Stereo adaptor or you may be able to use a 3.5 to 3.5 lead.

If you want to do this for a car CD player you need to know that there are several of these players that [b]Do Not[/b] read recorded media so you'll need to check that one out on your player. But if it does and it's capable of reading MP3 you can fit a lot more music time on a conventional CD with MP3 that you can with .WAV files so you'll most likely want to use the MP3 option to save things to.

Just remember that if you are using these in a car that both sunlight & heat can destroy the recorded CD's so you'll need to keep a copy out of the car to record from if you ever have your CD's in the car damaged/Stolen.

Col

The setup I use is in conjunction with the soundblaster card I have. Take the output of the cassette player to the input(line in) of the sound card. Using the software for the sound card I adjust the line levels and location on the hard drive(filename) and store as a .WAV file. Then using the recorder function I record and name the file. This can be done for each selection. Depending on the parameters you use for recording (44K sample rate PCM mode stereo for example) it will use about 13MB for every minute of time. These can be collected in the file and if you want, convert to MP3 and resaved. I then use the software for the CD burner to collect and organize the files before burning unto a CD. All cables and connectors should be of high quality to avoid any need to edit and clean up static, hiss and pop from them. The cables and such are all available from Radio Shack and the GOLD types are best. I've already done this with over 5,000 hours of cassette, vinyl, reel to reel, and 8 track media. Naming files and folders will be critical to the ease of collecting and burning.