Cassette Tape to MP3 Question

I have Windows 7 and Audacity 2.2.2.

I would like to use Audacity to record a cassette tape as an MP3.

First off, how do I know how high to set the volume on the tape player?

Someone has recommended that I download LAME MP3 codec and point Audacity to it. Is that still necessary in this version? How do I point Audacity to it?

Thank you.

[u]Tutorial - Copying tapes, LPs or MiniDiscs to CD[/u]. That may answer some of your questions.

First off, how do I know how high to set the volume on the tape player?

We don’t know anything about your tape player… Are you having a problem?

If you have a line-output or tape-output, there there is usually no volume control. If there is a headphone-output of course there is a volume control for that and the headphone-out will work into line-in.

If you have a laptop computer, you probably only have a mono-microphone input and that’s too sensitive and you won’t get good quality so you’ll need an external USB audio interface with line inputs. If you have a desktop/tower computer, use the line input on your soundcard.

Someone has recommended that I download LAME MP3 codec and point Audacity to it. Is that still necessary in this version? How do I point Audacity to it?

Yes, download and run [u]Lame v3.99.3 for Windows.exe[/u] to install the LAME encoder. After installing, Audacity should find it automatically and you can export as MP3.