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Making CD's

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by lawrin

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I have a friend who want to record music from a cassette to a CD. He bought a CD-Writer, and he said that he was able to connect an external cassette player to his computer. He thinks that he will just be able to play the cassette and the music will record onto the CD. I don't think it can be done that way. I think that he will have to record the music from the cassette player to a file on the computer's hard drive (with the use of a microphone or recording software), the copy the audio files from the hard drive to the CD writer.

Does anyone know if this can be done, and can you tell me who is right in their thinking, me or my friend?

Thanks,

Lawrin Walker

14 replies

by pvp

AFAIK, you're both right!

If you use Windows' Sound Recorder, you can listen to the cassette audio input and save .wav files, then burn them onto a _data_ CD.

You should also be able to record music CD's per se, but you guys are going to have to read the manual(s) that came with the CD writer and its software for that :)

by otl

First off if he plugs an output amp to a powered input amp (earphone/speaker to microphone), I will wonder which will win and not be damaged or burn out.

I don't know of a wave or midi recorder that can write directly to a CD, it would have to besaved to the hard drive first.

Good Luck to both of you!

by mckaytech

The music will have to be written to a data file first, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it has to be converted from analog to digital format and second, it has to be supplied to the CD-Writer at a constant rate.

A full answer is somewhat hardware dependent, but most sound cards will (with the right software) digitize an incoming audio stream to a file of some sort (often a *.wav file) whether that input comes in via the microphone input or the line-level input.

paul

by etoile

You can certainly record to a wav file using the software with your soundcard. If you want to clean up background noise, hisses, or scratches (esp if recording from an old vinyl LP) I have found Adaptec's Spin Doctor very easy to use. Good luck

by etoile

Though not wanting to sound like an advert for Adaptec, their Easy CD creator software (likely supplied with your friend's CD burner) or other burner software easily burns .wav files to CD in a format that is playable by ordinary CD players.

by richard_barsby

In answer to burning out one or the other aslong as you use the line out of the tape player there will be no problem. the other answers are correct but if as i suspect he wants to play the cd's on a home audio system then he is in trouble as they cannot play wav files, I'm afraid I don't know if you can get any software that can convert from wav files to cd audio.

Best Regards

R.K.Barsby

by bv2

Answer #5 is off-base. I have burned CDs for years by first recording as WAVs then burning to CDs. Winamp has an MP3 ripper built in to it so you can convert to WAV files and then burn to CD. I guess, what I'm trying to say, is the claim that home CD players will not play CDs burned from WAV files is patently false.

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