Old family band recordings

Audacity Help Forum Windows
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Hello.
I’m trying to convert about 15 old cassette records of our family band. This is a project for my grandmother but also for my dad and his brothers.
The recordings were done on a small portable cassette player/recorder. The actual player/recorder(as far as I understand) can be seen in the attached photo with the blue arrow. So the recordings were done in the 1970s and there was no external mic used.
So as I understand the recording is in Mono. After some testing the only well working cassette player on hand is the one on the right in the photo http://www.amazon.com/Sony-Pressman-Cassette-Recorder-Automatic/dp/B00001ZT4H. If I play the cassettes and record with Audacity can I have some feedback on a few things. I’ve done a test run and I’m a little familiar with the software but could use some help. By the way I used this guide to help get myself setup: http://www.nsftools.com/misc/TapeToCD.htm


When playing from the small cassette player the recording shows the right channel not as powerful in the monitor menu at the top of the screen.

  1. Should I record in stereo or mono via the menu in Audacity?
  2. And If I record in mono should I do a procedure listed here to make a stereo track (mix)?
    https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/turn-mono-track-to-stereo/2085/1
    20160121_190204-2.jpg
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  1. Should I record in stereo or mono via the menu in Audacity?

Record in mono.

If you can’t get that to work and you get a stereo recording with one “dead” channel, you can click the little drop-down arrow to the left of the waveform and “Split to Mono”. That will allow you to edit the left & right channels individually and you can delete the silent (or nearly silent) channel.


  1. And If I record in mono should I do a procedure listed here to make a stereo track (mix)?
    viewtopic.php?f=28&t=2155

There should be no reason to do that unless you want to make the left & right channels somehow-different to get “simulated stereo” (which I generally don’t recommend). A mono track will play out of both speakers. Basically everything is mono/stereo compatible. A mono cassette will play from both speakers if you have a stereo cassette player, and if you have a mono cassette player and a stereo tape, both channels will be mixed together. Vinyl records and computer files are also compatible both-ways.

CDs are always 2-channels, so a mono CD has a two identical channels. But, most CD burning software will take care of that automatically if you feed-in a mono track.

3

Awesome! Thanks for your help.
I haven’t recorded yet but will so do! :smiley: