I have 180 cassettes that I want to put on my laptop using DIGITNOW USB Audio Capture. When I am trying to record on my HP Windows 11 laptop the meters move and there is some distorted sounds. When I try the same thing on an Acer laptop with Windows 10 I can hear the sound of the recording with no problem. I have tried to follow the directions for setting it up. Host-MME, USB microphone, stereo recording, and my laptop speakers listed. I don’t understand why there is no problem with my Acer Windows 10 and i have this problem with my HP Windows 11. I would appreciate any suggestions.
Make sure Windows “enhancements” are turned OFF (for the USB device).
Just want to thank you for the help. I am pretty ignorant with computer stuff and I have been wandering on the internet for days searching for an answer. At first I misread your answer because I assumed the problem would be with the laptop speakers. Then I took a closer look at what you advised with the USB microphone device and it worked. Thank you for the help.
Good luck with your digitising project. 180 cassettes is a fairly big undertaking.
You might find these two YouTube videos very helpful in that respect:
- How to transfer a Cassette Tape to MP3 on your computer using Audacity.
- Use Audacity to title and export songs from an audio file using labels and multiple export.
The process has changed slightly since these were made but you will figure it out.
Mark B
Thanks for giving me even more help. I am not very technically minded as far as understanding many of the settings for recording my cassettes. I just want at least reasonably good sound that I can eventually put on cds. I will look at those YouTubes.
Thanks again
Charles
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You shouldn’t use a real microphone for your recordings. Connect the cassette player / the amplifier of your stereo equipment / whatever you use to play your cassettes to the computer using an “external sound card”, such as a Behringer UCA-202. There are also other products, but this one is mentioned often here.
There aren’t many “settings” you need to understand. The main things to know are:
- how to achieve a reasonable sound volume during recording
- how to separate the individual song titles during the export from Audacity (see the Audacity manual on exporting tracks based on text labels)
- which format you want to use at the end (this depends on how you want to use your music)
If you really want to burn CDs, you should export the music in a lossless format such as AIFF, WAV, etc.
If you want to store your music on a computer, you need to know that these files need lot of space, so MP3 would probably be the better choice.
Be aware that Youtube instructions are sometimes showing old versions of the software where some things may be quite different from today’s version.
A couple of other suggestions -
After recording, you might want to try some noise reduction, and on some recordings you might want to adjust the bass & treble, etc.
Whether you do that or not, it’s a good idea to run the Amplify or Normalize effect as the last step before exporting to “maximize” the volume. (They both do essentially the same thing.) These two effects/adjustments are linear and they don’t hurt or change sound quality (as long as you don’t change the settings to allow clipping/distortion).
You might want to “archive” and back-up your files as well as burn CDs. At some point you’ll probably want digital files to play on a computer or phone, etc. As you may know, CDs are 16-bit, 44.1kHz stereo. WAV or FLAC in the same format would be good. FLAC is lossless compression and the files will be almost half of the size. MP3 is lossy compression but at high-quality settings it’s very good (and better than cassette) and about 1/5th the size of a CD quality WAV. The advantage of a lossless archive is that you can convert to any lossless or lossy format in the future without worrying about the quality.
Audacity can add embedded metadata (AKA “tags”) but I find MP3Tag easier to use. With MP3Tag you can select a folder full of files (usually an album) and enter the common information once. Then you can enter the song title and track number for each track. Also, MP3Tag supports album art whereas Audacity doesn’t. If these are commercial releases you can usually find CD (or vinyl) cover artwork online and that may be better than scanning whatever art you have.
Audio player software finds and sorts the music from the artist/album/title information in the “tags” rather than from the file names & folder organization.
There are ways to add some of this data on CDs but it’s not as standardized and regular CD players don’t support it. It’s called “CD TEXT” and you’d have to check your CD burning application. (When you play a CD on your computer, it doesn’t usually get it from the CD. It goes online to find that information from the CD’s 'fingerprint", and your homemade CD won’t be in the database.)
Thanks for your suggestions. I just want to clarify that I am not using a microphone. For some reason the Digitnow audio capturing device which I am using is recognised as a USB microphone. As long as the device works for me I don’t care what my Computer calls it.
I just want to give a general thank you to everyone who has offered suggestions. This will be a big help to me. Some of my 180 Cassettes are over 50 years old so they may not be in the best shape for recording. i haven’t played any of them for years because they are so old. But now it is time to see what I can do with them. I will make a comparison with the Wav and the MP3 formats and hear if i can tell much of a difference. I plan on keeping the files on an external hard drive so the size isn’t a concern. i have been packing these Cassettes around with me for many years and i am thrifty enough that i would rather try to do something with them rather than buy modern recordings. and I brought back many of them from India so there is no telling how the years have treated them or the quality of the manufacturing over
there. I am looking forward to seeing how this project develops over the coming months, especially now that I have been given so many suggestions. Thanks again.