How To Transfer Cassettes To CD
By Randy Benjamin
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For additional information, address Randy Benjamin:
Subsidiary Rights
Randy Benjamin
60 Thompson Drive
Vincennes, IN 47591
Copyright © 2010 by Randy Benjamin
www.randybenjamin.com
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Other books by Randy Benjamin
FREE Internet
How To Publish Anything On Amazon’s Kindle
Tapestries” (Children’s Album and Book – Summer 2010)
The Healthy Computer
The Internet Guide Handbook
More Of The Internet Guide
Original Songs” An Album of original songs
Anomaly (Sci-fi novel – Summer 2010)
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How To Transfer Cassettes to CDs
I’ve been involved in the music business most of my life. For five years in the early 70’s, I owned, managed, and was the head engineer at a recording studio in Nashville, TN. I’ve been a computer consultant for the last thirty years so I’ve had a lot of experience in both digital and analog media.
One of the questions I’ve been asked the most is, “How can I copy my old cassette tapes to the computer and turn them into CDs?” You don’t really need an e-book to tell you how to do this, you can always Google it, but it’s nice to have the information gathered in one place and presented by someone who’s done it hundreds of times.
If I can step you through the process in a way you can easily understand, it will certainly be worth the few dollars you’ve spent.
We’ll start by going over exactly what we are trying to accomplish, what equipment and software we’ll need, and finally, how to do it. I’ll also give you a little theory along the way so you’ll understand why I’m doing something in a particular way rather than just telling you to do it.
Let’s get started…first, some history of the media’s we’ll be dealing with. There have been a lot of cassette formats available over the years…it’s important for you to know which ones you’ll be working with.
Cassettes are a convenient way to record music, but they don’t provide the best quality. That’s because of the median itself. Before the cassette, music was recorded on reel to reel tape recorders. Home units used .25" tape running at either 3.75 ips (inches per second) or 7.5 ips. While these tapes provided much better sound quality, the recorders themselves were often large, and expensive.
It could also be a chore to get setup for a recording session. You had to mount an empty take-up real on the right hub of the machine. Then you’d need to take the blank reel of tape (supply reel) and mount it on the left hub. Next, you’d need to thread the lose tape over the record/play heads between a capstan and roller, around the tension arm, and finally, connect it to the empty take-up reel.
When the cassette was introduced, (around 1964 in the U.S.) it quickly became the medium of choice for home settings. Cassettes were relatively inexpensive to buy and they were much easier to use. All of the hassle of loading the reel to reel recorder was replaced by a simple cassette mechanism. Both the take-up and supply reels were incased in a plastic case along with the tension arm. All that was needed to either play or record the tape was to drop the cassette into the machine, press the record/play button, and you were on your way.
The cost for this ease of use was sound quality. Where the reel to reel recorder used quarter inch wide tape to record on, and a minimum tape speed of 3.75 ips, the cassette used eighth inch wide tape and a slower speed of only 1.75 ips. This crammed the same amount of data (music) into one quarter of the space. A loss in quality was the byproduct.
But technology would come to the rescue. Of course, this same technology would make reel to reel recording even better as well. What happened was that tape manufacturers began improving the quality of the tape so a stronger record signal was possible. This in turn produced greater bandwidth with a higher signal to noise ratio. The quality of your transfer will greatly depend on the type of tape used in the original recording process.
The composition of these new tapes continued to improve…the highest quality being designated, “metal” in the mid 70s. The only problem was, these new tapes could only be used on the more expensive machines with special, “high bias” erase heads.
From the development of simple iron oxide tapes through the, “chrome” series that BASF brought out, there was a steady stream of constantly changing formats. Add to this that two distinct type of noise reduction (Dolby and DBS) were in use as well.
So, what’s all this got to do with getting your cassettes converted to a digital format and recorded onto a CD? Well, I wanted to give you an idea of what you might run into. Cassettes can be as different as night and day and most likely, you won’t be playing back a cassette on the same machine it was recorded on. So you’ll want to try and match the characteristics of your present cassette deck to the one that made the original recording.
Again, technology comes to the rescue. For one thing, most of the problems with the various tape formats are incurred in the recording process. Playback is pretty straight forward, except in the case of noise reduction. If either Dolby or DBX was used, it’s best to have a player capable of decoding these formats. Otherwise, you’ll get an inferior reproduction.
In the case of Dolby, it’s not so bad. You’ll get a boost in the high frequency spectrum but no distortion. DBX is a horse of a different color. DBX was most commonly used in professional recording equipment and wasn’t used in many home systems, but there were a few.
If you were an audiophile in the early years of cassettes, you might have bitten the bullet and bought a DBX system. DBX boosted the entire audio spectrum by as much as 10 DB. When played on a non-DBX machine, you will definitely hear the compression in the sound.
In this case, you’ll need to either find a playback cassette player with DBX built in, (good luck with that) or look on eBay for an outboard DBX unit. I’ve seen them for $50 or less. I doubt you’ll run into any DBX encoded tapes, but if you do, at least you’ll know what you need to do to play them.
Dolby came in two flavors. Professional recording studios used what was called; Dolby, “A.” Home systems used Dolby, “B.” This shouldn’t be a problem though as virtually none of the home cassette decks incorporated Dolby, “A.”
The quality of the cassette deck has always played a large part in how good the recordings would be. Higher quality tapes have held up the better as well. If you have both of these things going for you, you’re way ahead of the game. Today’s recorders produce high quality recordings without having to spend a lot of money. As with most electronic devices, prices have come down while quality has gone up.
Of course, digital is replacing the analog tape technology at an ever increasing rate. It’s solid state, no noise reduction is necessary, the media lasts longer, and it’s easier to get a high quality recording. It compares to the way digital cameras have pushed film cameras into the background. Technology won’t be denied.
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Let’s Get Down To Business
Sorry for the history lesson, but it might come in handy sometime, especially if you happen to run into any DBX encoded cassettes. Otherwise, let’s get started by seeing what kind of hardware we’re going to need for the transfer from cassette to computer.
There are several kinds of inputs and outputs we could be dealing with. I’ll discuss the cassette player first. In order to get the audio signal from the cassette player to the computer’s sound card, you are going to need an audio cable.
To determine what kind of cable you’ll need, you need to look at your cassette player and see what kind of an output jack it has. On the least expensive players, you’ll usually only find a headphone jack. You need to have at least a headphone jack in order to make the connection to the computer.
Transfers using the headphone jack are the least desirable. This is because the headphone output is amplified. It’s normally used to drive a set of headphones. When you amplify a signal, you introduce a noise into it. Because players with headphone only outputs are usually on the inexpensive side, the electronics are probably not the best (electronically quite) either.
Don’t despair if this is all you have. You can still make a great sounding CD using this device, but like all things, the better the quality to start with, the better you’re likely to be in the end. If a better player is available, use it. For now, let’s continue with the headphone only scenario.
Almost all headphone jacks on cassette decks use what is commonly called a one eighth inch stereo phone plug. This simple means that the jack is one eighth inch wide and it’s a type of plug called a phone plug. The headphone jack, mates with a stereo plug. Most of the cables, plugs, and jacks we’ll be dealing with are stereo. Only the microphone jack is mono.
Computer sound cards use this same format. What you’ll need to get the signal from the cassette deck to the computer is a cable that has stereo, one eighth inch plug (male) on both ends. Since it’s a stereo cable, it carries both the left and right channel information.
Now, because the output of the headphone jack is amplified, you need a way to lower the amplitude of the signal it’s supplying. Of course, you could just turn down the volume...but this doesn’t always provide a clear signal.
A better way is to pick up an attenuating dubbing cable. This will provide a much better match between the headphone output on your cassette deck and the input jack on your computer’s sound card.
This may sound more complicated than it is. If there’s a Radio Shack near you, tell them you need an Attenuating cable with 1/8 inch phone stereo plugs on both ends. The model number is 42-2152 and it’s listed on their website at $4.99.
If you can’t find one of these then a standard 6’ cable with 1/8 inch stereo phone plugs on each end will do. But the attenuating cable will make things a lot easier.
Plug this cable into the Aux jack on your computer’s sound card if it has one. If not, you’ll be forced to use the Mic jack. In this case the attenuating cable is even more important because the Mic input is another amplified signal source. The Mic jack is color coded, “pink.” I’m going to use this jack as the one that we’ll be using as the default jack on the computer because every computer will have this jack. Auxiliary jacks will most likely be found only on high end computers. Even then, it will still have the mic jack.
Let’s review the setup so far. You are going to be connecting the headphone output of the cassette deck, to the input (pink) jack on the computer. There is a problem in using the, “mic” input on your computer that needs to be addressed. Since it’s a mono input, you are only going to be getting the left channel information from your cassette transfer. There’s a way around this. You can use a stereo to mono adapter that will combine both channels of stereo information into one mono channel. You’ll loose the stereo effect, but you’ll still capture both channels of information. This device can be found at Radio Shack. Its catalog number is 274-882 and it costs $3.99. You’ll need to plug it into the cassette recorder and then plug the dubbing jack into it. You won’t have this problem if your cassette deck has Aux or Line Out jacks. Again, you have better options when you have a more expensive tape deck. Here's a view of the wiring diagram.
If you know that the cassette was recorded with Dolby noise reduction, be sure to turn it on. Usually there’s a switch or a button to push in order to do this. The same thing applies to DBX. Listen to the output of the cassette. If it sounds, “flat” (no high-frequency) when the Dolby or DBX is turned on, there’s a good chance that the tape was recorded with no noise reduction enhancements.
At this point, you’ll need to load Audacity in order to record what is on your cassette to your computer’s hard drive, but I’m going to go ahead and explain a few more ways to connect your cassette player to your computer first.
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High end cassette players and sound cards
High end cassette player/recorders have a lot more options to deal with. You’ll almost certainly have noise reduction of some kind, most likely Dolby. You’ll also have the ability to use high-bias cassette tapes.
The problem with cassettes is that the slow (1.78 IPS) doesn’t allow much signal per unit of tape to be recorded. So the bandwidth isn’t nearly as great as with reel to reel recorders. This also presents a problem with the inherent background noise of the tape itself. This is why the better decks use noise reduction. The noise they are reducing is tape hiss, a high-frequency sound usually above 10,000 cps.
The better cassette tapes are capable of storing a stronger analog signal because of the enhanced magnetic coating on the Mylar base. Depending on the type of coating, (metal probably being the best) different types of bias (erase signal) are used in the recording process. This only has to do with recording. Not playback as is the case with Dolby and DBX.
The bias signal is an electronic high-frequency signal that conditions the tape to receive the analog signals being recorded. Only premium grade tapes are able to use this kind of biasing. If you are transferring Type II or Metal cassette tapes, you have the best chance of getting an excellent duplicate of your recording.
The setup for a high-end recorder/player is a little different because of the extra jacks available. On most high-end decks, you’ll find auxiliary input and output jacks. The mic jack and headphone (earplug) jacks will be available as well. The difference between the auxiliary and headphone jack is that the auxiliary jack is not amplified; therefore, the sound is of a much higher quality. And, it’s stereo!
Since the auxiliary jack is at what’s called, “line level” you won’t need the attenuating cable that was needed with the headphone output. You could run into another problem though. On most cassette decks, the Aux In and Out jacks are standard 1/8 inch stereo connectors, but there were a few decks that used an RCA Pin plugs. If this is the case, you’ll need to get an adapter that goes from two (for stereo) RCA pin connectors to a single 1/8 inch in stereo connector. (On the back of your computer.)
Probably 95 out of 100 decks use 1/8 inch stereo connectors. The 6 foot stereo RCA phono Y-adapter is available at Radio Shack for $8.99. Its model number is 42-2551. This is for the odd ball, 5 out of 100 computers that use the RCA setup.
More likely you’ll need the cable with the 1/8 inch phone plugs on each end. Radio Shack is only showing this cable in a 12 inch length. Its model number is 42-2497 and it costs $5.49. That’s not a very long cable. You may want to get a different cable and add an adapter to one end giving you a full six foot cable. If so, do this. Get the six foot stereo cable # 42-2157 at $5.99. This has a 1/8 inch stereo plug on one end and a 1 / 4 inch stereo plug on the other. Now, you’ll need an adapter to take the 1 / 4 inch plug down to 1/8 inch.
This is a pain in the butt, but Radio Shack doesn’t carry the exact cable we need in their catalog. The adapter you’ll need is 274-875 and costs $5.49. This is a stereo inline adapter, 1 / 4 inch to 1/8 inch. The larger of the two plugs on the cable slips inside this adapter so that you have two 1/8 inch stereo plugs on both ends.
You might ask a salesman at Radio Shack for a cable with 1/8 inch stereo phone plugs on both ends before you buy a cable and adapter. I can’t believe they don’t have this cable already made up in anything other than the 12 inch version listed on their website. But that’s all they’re showing. .
Here’s an example of how you’d connect a high-end cassette deck to your computer.
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Transfer Software – Audacity
Now that you’ve made the connections between your cassette deck and your computer, the next thing you’ll need is software to facilitate the transfer. You’re in luck here because the software you’ll need is free and it’s excellent to boot. Before we download it though, you need to be aware of what is going to be needed from your computer as far as storage requirements.
Most computers these days use fast, ATA hard drives operating at 7,200 rpm. This is really important when you consider how much data you’ll be recording. Most of you will be recording music, and in stereo. This means that you’ll be working with megabytes of data.
The music stored on your cassette player is in analog form. When it was recorded, the various frequencies were turned into electrical waves of varying magnetic strength and stored on the cassette tape. When you transfer these wave forms to your computer, the waves will be converted to digital data. Instead of varying electrical waves, you’ll be dealing only with bits of 1s and Os.
To do this, a device in your sound card called an analog to digital (A/D) converter comes into play. The quality of the conversion depends on the two things. The quality of the components making up the A/D converter, and the number of bits used to sample the analog data.
As the music streams into your computer, the A/D converter takes samples of it thousands of times a second. It assigns each millisecond of music a digital signature. In the case of your CD player, the music is sampled 41.1 thousand times a second. This is known as standard CD sampling. That’s what we’ll be using when we start are transfer.
At 41.1K a second, we are storing data on the hard drive at a rate of 41.1K times two (stereo) or a little over 88 thousand bytes for every second of music. That’s nearly 5,280,000 bytes a minute. So you can see why it’s important to know before hand, just how much material you’ll be recording.
It you were recording a one hour album, figure on using around 318 million bytes of hard drive space. Once recorded, you can trim this to around 31 megabytes by converting it to an MP3 file. But if you want the highest quality reproduction, you’ll need to leave it as a wave file. With this in mind, let’s look at the software we’ll need.
You may have noticed that you already have recording software in the program directory. If you go to <start> <all programs> <accessories> and <entertainment>, you see a program called, “sound recorder.” For short (one minute or less) recordings, this will work fine. But it’s very limited in what it can do. What we need is a more professional audio editing program. Fortunately, a really good one can be downloaded over the Net for free.
Log onto www.audacity.com. The software is great, but the website is very confusing. I had to hunt a little before I actually got the file downloaded. So if you don’t succeed the first time, try again. You’ll get it. And it’s worth it.
Once you’ve downloaded it to your computer, click on the, “audacity.exe” file and it will install onto your computer and put an icon on your desktop. This program does a lot of things. You can use it to enhance your music in dozens of ways. You can arrange the order of the songs you’ve downloaded. You can, “normalize” them so they will all be about the same volume. You can edit out clicks and pops. You can fade into and out of a song.
Most of the things you with this program are way beyond the scope of, “How To Transfer Cassettes To CD.” But I won’t leave you hanging. If you’ll log onto: www.youtube.com and type, “Audacity tutorial” into the search box, you find dozens of tutorials that will show you how to use Audacity’s advanced features. And there are a bunch of them.
What we’re interested in right now though is getting your music transferred from your cassette to your computer. Once this has been accomplished, you can burn it to a CD or DVD.
Before we run the Audacity software, we want to be sure that the correct inputs and outputs are selected in Windows. This will depend on which option you used to connect your cassette deck to your computer. If you are using the mic input on the computer, you’ll want to select the mic input in Windows volume settings. If you selected the Auxiliary input, you’ll need to put a check next to the Auxiliary input.
Here’s how we do that. Click on Start at the bottom left of your screen. Now click on <all programs> <accessories> <entertainment> and finally, <volume control>. This will bring up a control panel that has several items in it. It’s also divided into two sections, one for playback and one for record. The playback controls will be displayed first. You’ll probably see several items listed with faders (sliding volume controls) under each item.
On my system, I have Wave, Aux, CD Player, and Line In selected. The master fader (Volume Control) is the first fader in the group. On top of the fade is an additional Balance control. This allows you to send the sound to either the left, middle, or right speaker, or, any combination of the two. You can have left center just as easily as full left or full right. Just move the fader to the position you want the sound to come from. The default position is, “center.”
You’ll also see a box under each of these items labeled, “mute.” If you click in this box, it will turn off that output. For instance, clicking in the Volume Control box will cut off all sounds coming from your computer. If you wanted to silence the Wave sounds, click in the box labeled, “Wave.”