Guys, I’m transferring some pretty old cassette tapes I found here at home to my PC. This is what I’m doing: I’m using a stereo system to play the cassettes, than I’m connecting its headphone line out (P2) to the analog line in (P2, the blue connector) on my sound card. Than I’m using Audacity to record it. My questions are: Is the default pre-set on Audacity the best one? (stereo, 44.1 KHz, 32-bit float). Should I use another frequency? (I really don’t mind the final file size). What about the volume? Should I rec it with a high volume and than lower it with Audacity? Rec it with a low volume and amplify it? None of the above? Is this a good method to transfer cassettes to pc?
I use Audacity 2.0.5 and my sound card is an onboard one.
Thank you in advance!
(stereo, 44.1 KHz, 32-bit float)
Those settings are fine. After recording, you can use the same settings except export to 16-bits. 32-bit floating-point is an intermediate “working” bit depth. CDs are 44.1kHz, 16-bits, stereo. There are no floating-point digital-to-analog converters, so there’s no point in using floating-point as your final format.
If you export to MP3 or AAC (lossy compression), don’t worry about bit depth. These use floating-point and are converted to integer by the decoder at playback time.
If you choose to go lossless. Consider FLAC or ALAC (lossless compression) rather than uncompressed WAV. “Tagging” (title, artist, album, etc.) is not well supported for WAV files.
What about the volume? Should I rec it with a high volume and than lower it with Audacity?
Don’t record too hot. Shoot for peaks of -3 to -6dB. If your recorded file hits 0dB, it probably tried to go over 0dB and was clipped to 0dB. Nothing bad will happen if you get very-close to 0dB, the analog source is somewhat unpredictable so it’s a good idea to leave yourself at least 3dB of headroom. (-6dB is 50% or half-height in the Audacity waveform display… If you are getting half-way, but all the way to the top, you’re good!)
Unlike analog tape which starts to saturate (distort) slightly as the volume gets higher and gets worse the higher you go, there is a hard limit to your analog-to-digital converter. With analog, you can occasionally go to +3dB or so (slightly into the red).
Digital simply won’t go over 0dBFS. If your recording your levels are too high, you’ll get hard clipping (flat-topped distorted waves). A few bits of clipping here and there won’t be too terrible, but it’s good practice to avoid it altogether.
If you record too low, you lose signal-to-noise ratio. That’s similar to analog tape… If you record tape at a low level, then you turn it up at playback time and you also turn-up the tape hiss. But your soundcard isn’t as noisy as cassette tape, so you can leave lots of headroom before you run into noise issues. The noise from the tape will be the bigger issue and the signal-to-noise ratio from the original tape will stay the same no matter what the level is.
After recording, you can run the Amplify effect to boost the level. Amplify will scan your file and default to the amount of gain need for 0dB peaks. (Setting the peaks to 0dB is called “normalizing” or “maximizing”.) If Amplify defaults to 0dB gain, the peaks are probably already normalized/maximized and probably clipped.
Is this a good method to transfer cassettes to pc?
Not bad. The headphone output (at mid to high volume) is a good match for the line-input (blue) on your soundcard. If you have a cassette deck with line-level RCA jacks, that’s even better.
(The microphone input on a consumer soundcard or laptop is basically worthless for high quality recording. The blue line-in is the right one.)
Awesome explanation! Thank you so much!