Audacity Forum

A computer nerd friend suggested Audacity as a way to load my cassette tapes into MP3 files, either to store on my laptop hard drive or to put on disks. (I planned to use a patchcord to connect the tape recorder to the laptop, running from the EAR jack of the tape recorder to the microphone jack of the laptop. He said the biggest disadvantage would be I would have to record everything in real time.)

I am not all that computer savvy. How do I set up Audacity for something like this? I loaded the program just this evening and I'm at a total loss as to how to get started on a project like this. Please have sympathy for my lack of skills, and walk me through--step by step, dumbing down as much as you need to--how to set this up. Once I know this, I'll probably be good to go. I do, however, reserve the right to post an SOS if I need it.

Thanks in advance!

Yes, but it's a little more involved than just plugging it all together. For one thing, the tape-out is stereo and the Microphone-In of the laptop is mono -- usually, left-only. That and the loudness ranges don't match.

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Recor ... m_Cassette

Koz

Koz: I knew about stereo-to-mono. About 95% of what I'm transferring is voice recordings, especially old-time radio tapes, which were recorded and broadcast in mono in the '30s and '40s. I plan to monitor the volume by listening with headphones plugged into my laptop. I'll click the URL you included in your prompt (very much appreciated!) reply to my inquiry.

Did you also know about the level problems? The Mic-In connection is expecting loudnesses a thousand times lower than the Line-Out or Headphone-Out of the tape machine. If you connect them to each other it can be distortion city.

You can use a Deskside Windows PC or a Mac. Both of those have Stereo Line-In connections and will connect to a tape machine just fine.

If you're on a Windows Laptop, sometimes you can switch your single connection to Stereo Line-In with software, but that's not normal.

We usually push people to a UCA-202 sound card for this kind of work.

http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/UCA202.aspx

Koz