Audacity Forum

I'm a 70 yo user and I apologize if this problem has already been discussed in this forum.

I'm not very proficient with computers and applications. My son gave me recently a MacBookPro (10.6.4) to store my photos and music I enjoy.

I'm trying to store music I have in 40+ years old tapes, still in good shape in my computer to use them with iTunes, and I am using Audacity (1.3.12 unicode) for that purpose. I spent all afternoon copying just one track and succeeded. In trying to 'export' this track to the computer desktop I found that once exported, I can't play the tape using the icon Audacity created on the desktop. The track playing time is about 2 1/2 minutes, but the size of the file Audacity produced is only 4KB. This tell me that the track was not properly exported.

I exported the track using apple and windows formats with the same result. I was not abe to export it as an MP3 file.

I will appreciate any information on how to correctly export these tracks.

Step by step ...

1) You successfully connected your cassette deck to the MacBook and recorded one "track" off the cassette into Audacity, right? You heard sound while you were recording and you can play back the track after you recorded it?

2) Having just 2 1/2 minutes of recorded, stereo sound in Audacity, you go to File > Export, choose "AIF" from the format menu, and export the recording to a file on the desktop. You did not choose "Export Selection".

3) You're sure you chose File > Export, not File > Save As?

The 4KB file sounds like it's an Audacity .aup file, not a .aif file. What is the file extension of the exported file?

Meanwhile, there is a tutorial in the manual on doing this task: http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... iscs_to_CD

-- Bill

Bill - thank you for your reply - The problem I had was the track was exported as an audacity file. I took the time to learn about MP# exporting, and I have 3 tracks working on my hardrive.

Guess I'll be busy as I have over 40 tapes to work on.

Thanks for your help.

You do need to pay attention to that MP3 thing. MP3 is a compressed and damaged file format, not suitable for archival storage. It's a delivery and restricted quality internet format.

WAV, or AIF (or AIFF) are distortionless, uncompressed formats suitable for production and storage.

You can use your high quality AIF file to make a lower quality MP3 file for your iPod if you want, but once you have the lower quality MP3, you can't reverse the damage.

You also want to be in the higher quality formats if you need to apply corrections or filters to your work. MP3 doesn't do that very well.

Koz

Thank you koz, I appreciate your recommendation on the exporting process. I haven't exported more audio files from my old tapes but expect to start doing so in a couple of days and will be following your advice.

Since you ae using iTunes on a MAC I would recommend that you consider using Apple's AAC compressed format rather than MP3. Bitrate for bitrate (and size for size AAC is generally reckoned to give better audio quality than MP3.

You may find this workflow from the manual useful (it's one of the set that Bill pointed you to): http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... _to_iTunes

WC

WC - I appreciate your input and bookmarked the link you provided. I will try that option next.

Thanks again

Again within the Mac, you can use iTunes for format translation. Go into iTunes Preferences and set "CD Importing" format for your goal. Remember where it was so you don't mess up your iPod music.

Pull your music into iTunes, select it, and Advanced > Create a [new format] Version. iTunes will present the old and new versions of the song when it gets done converting.

You can convert many multiple songs at once by batch selecting

Koz

Hi Kos
There is too much to learn and keep track of and remembering is... what was I saying?

Any how, reviewing what I wrote before, I made a mistake with the number of tapes I have to go through. It is not 40 but almost 400 and so far I have completed 5 and at this rate I don't know if I ever will finish this project.

But, with the help of all of you guys, it has been much easier than when I first started.

Thanks to all of you for your help.