Turning old music digital

[AZSpeechCoach]

Years ago I created a series of mix tapes. Lately, I've become worried that they are going to get damaged or just crumble. Does anybody know how I can load the songs into the computer from the casettes? For that matter, how can I turn songs into mp3s? Can I use Windows Media Player? Any help would be appreciated as I want to fill my computer with as much crappy music as possible to annoy my wife :p

[Buccaneer]

I have been using the best program to do that - Spin Doctor, one of the programs in the Easy CD Creator Deluxe suite. I use it transfer LPs (you remember, those big black disks) in .wav on my HD, with appropriate filterings.

[stkelly52]

by using a double male end headphone cord you can attach your tape player to your computer through your sound card (plug into the "line in" hole that most people never use).

Then you can use many different programs to convert those to MP3

[3ric]

"Clean" is one of the best programs out there for filtering analog audio signals.

[Hurst2112]

Funny you should ask...(seeing as how I work with audio fer a living).

All the guys gave great ways to get your stuff converted from analog to digital. However, you must decide if the quality of digital audio your computer can handle will be sufficient.


In the case of your tapes, or anything for that matter, the line in on your computer will be fine for the job. Most line ins on PCs are limited to 16 bit/ 44.1K audio, which is cd quality. This is more than adequate for the job you are performing. The problem arises when you take into account the analog to digital conversion. Most pcs conversion is not the best quality. Yet, as I have experienced, most people don't mind that they don't have the best conversion. It will sound good when you do record the files into your computer...technically, it wont be the best conversion you could get.

In Buc's case, Transferring LPs to digital is a little more difficult if you wish to preserve the frequency spectrum of LPs. LPs, when compared to their CD counterparts, do sound better than the digital version. When transferring LPs to digital, try to get the highest sample rate (kHz) as you can. The higher the the kHz, the better representation of the wave form. Cds are 44100 samples per second, the highest sample rate out there on the market is 192000 samples per second. Along with the sample rate, there is bit depth.

Am i boring you? hehe. I am almost done.

cds are 16 bit. Think of a bit as a string of number that represent each sample. So, if you have 1 sample of a waveform, the quality of that sample would be represented by 16 numbers:

1010110101001110 (16)

Now, a 24 bit sample of audio (at 44100 samples per second) would look like this:

100101001110010101001101 (24)

This means that for every sample (44100, 48000, 88200, 96000, 176400 and 192000 are the most common) there are either 16 or 24 1s and 0s to represent each sample.


All digital to analog converters do this. However, there are better quality converters out there that your money can buy.

The ability to convert the analog waveforms to digital information is better with higher end converters.

Whew! There is also the Nyquist theory and all that happy horseshit that needs to be added in the equation, but you get the idea. ;)


Bottom line, you have good advice to get the job done so you can preserve your analog recordings.