Cassettes to MP3 CDs

[tes918]

I am transferring audio cassettes (John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series) to CDs. The stories are 3 hours long and need to be downloaded as MP3s to fit on one CD. My problem is that when I play these CDs in my car I have to turn the volume to the highest level and they are still hard to hear. I have 21 of these CDs and a few work fine so I know it is some dumb thing that I am doing during the recording process. My cassette player is plugged into my sound card and as I have said a few of the transfers are working well. Can anyone help. I need to stop making coasters.
Tom

[kozikowski]

You know you're not making a Music CD, right? So the performance in the car depends on the MP3 decoder included in the car radio to be proper and calibrated.

Above that, you have to capture the performance at the right level. When you capture the tapes, do the red record sound meters bounce all the way up to -10 to -6 or so? That's where they need to be for good volume without distortion.

Try this. Open up one of your old captures (cut it down to a couple of minutes for the test) and apply the normalize filter. Edit > Select > All. Effect > Normalize > OK.

Burn that one song to a data CD with an MP3 on it (which is what you have been doing) and see how that sounds.

After this, make sure the red meters bounce really high without smacking "0". Use the input volume slider next to the microphone symbol. Any music that hits "0" on the meters becomes permanently damaged, so watch that.

Koz

[tes918]

Thank you very much will approach as directed

[gthoenen]

I have a similar situation, but I'm having trouble at the most basic level. That is, how do I set up an MP3 file in Audacity to receive the recording as it is played? So far, I have only been able to record something less than a minute.

If I can get the recording going, can I use the Pause and -- ultimately -- the Stop buttons to keep things under control? At what point do I assign a filename to the new MP3 file, and how do specify where it should be put?

Dumb questions, I know, but just getting started seems for some reason kinda complicated.

Thanks for any help.

-gthoenen

[waxcylinder]

I have a similar situation, but I'm having trouble at the most basic level. That is, how do I set up an MP3 file in Audacity to receive the recording as it is played? So far, I have only been able to record something less than a minute.

-gthoenen

You don't set up Audacity to record to Mp3 - Audacity records into its own format. Once you have finished the recording and any required editing - then you can Export to Mp3 or Wav or whatever.

WC