If you're like me you've got a number of cassette's still kicking around that don't exist on your iPod or in your digital music collection. I finally decided to address the problem and convert a number of these tapes into digital. Here's how its done:
What you'll need:
- 1 Cassette Player with a standard mini out jack - in my case a fairly cheap Cassette Deck (if you have a higher end cassette deck you may need a slightly different patch cable)
- 1 Patch Cable - in this case a Mini RCA to Mini RCA Cable with two Male attachments on either end
- 1 Mac - in my case a Macbook Pro
- Cassette Tapes
- Audio Capture software - in my case I used the Audacity an open source software package that supports Mac, Windows and Linux platforms. Garageband will also handle this task.
- Download libmp3lame which is a plug-in for Audacity that enables it to export files to MP3 format
- Connect your cassette player to your Mac (depending on your version you may have an audio line-in jack as is the case with the Macbook Pro or you may need to purchase a third party cable that operates through USB - I'll leave you to Google this elsewhere on the web).
- Next launch Audacity and start a New Project (from the File Menu)
- Go to the Audacity Menu and select Preferences select the Tab "Audio I/O" under the Recording section set the drop down menu to "Built-in Input" then click OK.
- Next press play on the cassette player and push the Record button in Audacity you'll see the log begin to move with the Wave form varying with the level of the audio on your cassette.
- After you've sampled a small section of audio hit stop and listen to your result. At this point you'll likely want to play around with the different levels within Audacity to get the optimal recording.
- Once you're happy with the line levels and you're ready to start begin a new project and record the entire cassette.
- Now that you've got you're cassette file in you may find some artifacts in the recording that you don't like such as that annoying cassette recorder hiss. Here is how to remedy this: find a section of your clip that is a pause that contains just the hiss then select that section and go to the Effects menu and select Noise Removal. Hit the Sample Noise button it will then close this dialog box - don't worry it just sampled the noise. Now go to the Edit menu and choose Select All next return to the Effects menu then select Noise Removal again this time click on the Remove Noise button. Once completed listen to the project again and the prior steps should have removed that annoying hiss if not play around with the noise removal options some more.
- Next go to the File menu and select Export as MP3. Follow the dialogs and save your recording as an MP3 file.
- Launch iTunes and go to the File menu and select Import navigate to the MP3 file you just created select it and click on import.
- Finally synch your iPod and listen to your newly digitized recording.
