Spanish Cassette
How can I put everything that’s on my cassettes into CDs.?
I work as a teacher. I teach Spanish, French, English, and Japanese. Over the years I’ve gotten A LOT of cassettes to teach languages. I check every week at Barnes & Noble and Hastings. But for some reason, the content from the courses that used to be sold about 10, 15 years ago was a lot better than what’s coming out today. I love cassettes, I have 20 year old cassettes, and they work great, even after years of being left in the dust before me getting to them, and adding to my teaching material. CDs suck, if a CD is ever left on the dust, it’ll get scratched, I can’t imagine a CD, being forgotten for 20 years, and still be working.
I’m not a big fan of CDs, but I want have some sort of backup for all my very hard find cassettes.
You will need a cassette player (!), PC with a stereo input to soundcard, conversion software, CD writer. Yep that’s about it, oh yeah and a lot of time…..
Note: if you are using a laptop, you may need a USB external soundcard (mine has only a mono mic input – not good enough!) – you can get cheap, simple but effective ones (from Hong Kong) via ebay…
You could get someone to do it for you, friends of mine at: www.cassette2cd.co.uk for one. There are plenty to choose from out on the web, this type of job is perfect for a 'virtual' studio.
The software is probably the thing you really want to know about.. you will find loads out there. Personally I use Magix Audio Cleaning Lab – primarily for lifting vinyl, but will take any analogue signal. It has loads of features including cleaning filters, effects and editing… it’s cheap too and even comes with a stereo cable – try ebay. There are loads more, some even free downloads – listen to folks who have used the software then have a go….
Oh yeah, and Magix has automatic track recognition based on silence between tracks and auto-stop recording so you can go out for the day and it will stop at the end of your tape – really useful!! You will use up loads of hard-drive space, so don’t try this if you are pushed for space…You may need to purge the huge files every so often (10MB per minute WAV files, 1MB per minute MP3). You could save some space recording directly into MP3 at the sacrifice of a little sound quality.
If it's backup you're after, then MP3s at 128kbps would give good quality, MP3 at 192kbps will apparently give you a recording quality which is virtually indistinguishable from CD (WAV files) - worth considering as you will be able to get a lot of tapes backed up onto a single CDROM. Considering your tapes will be speech-based, bit-rate (ie. 128kbps or 192kbps) will not be overly important - same with the stereo input problem with laptops, only really an issue with music.
One last thing, track recognintion works great for CDs in WAV format (for playing in a standard CD player), I don't think it applies to MP3s though as each MP3 file would need to be separated into individual tracks - This is how Magix software treats it anyhow.
Hope this helps
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