Cassette to CD using Audacity on Mac OS X

[billw58]

Did you follow the link in the tutorial to this page? http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... nce_Finder

-- Bill

[kozikowski]

Silence finder isn't going to work because cassette tapes are never silent. [ffffffffffffffffff]

Unless your tapes were top quality, Cobalt Metal, High Bias, Dolby C, they're going to have serious tape noise underneath the music. Silence Finder kills phonograph records for the same reason. One or two cat hair pops in the wrong place and that's the end of the tool's accuracy.

Nice try, though. It usually takes two or three extended manual cleanup sessions to make buying the music on a new Music CD or downloading it fresh look pretty good.

This transfer thing only really works if you have the one and only recording of a band and it was never released on a commercial product.

I have several vinyl disks that are so far out of print they qualify for archeological digs and I have the only known recording of an organ recital in Los Angeles. Stuff like that is totally worth it.

Koz

[waxcylinder]

Nice try, though. It usually takes two or three extended manual cleanup sessions to make buying the music on a new Music CD or downloading it fresh look pretty good.

Sadly even that does not always work noiselessly either.

The one track that I've heard off the recent boxed-CD-set release of Sandy Denny, her cover of Dylan's It Ain't Me Babe, was recorded as a demo on her home reel-to-reel tape deck and you can hear definite tape hiss. But it's still a great track to listen to

WC

[rimbaud65]

I know now that I didn't exactly know how noise reduction worked but I think I know now. On a CD I burned the noise is reduced quite subtantially but there's a slight squeking sound on the bakground of that CD. On silent portions it can be heard, like a wheel squeking in the background. Does anyone know what kind of sound it could be and how I can get rid of it? I'll appreciate.

[billw58]

It's probably the result of over-aggressive noise reduction. If you still have the original non-noise-reduced files, try again with a lower setting. I usually go for 9 dB - any more and you are inviting the kind of effect you've noticed.

Alternatively, it could be tape "stiction" - squeaky tape, but this is highly unlikely as cassettes never (to my knowledge) suffered from that problem.

http://www.tangible-technology.com/tape/baking1.html

-- Bill

[kozikowski]

It's really easy to get noise reduction artifacts: bubbling, gargling, squeeking. Noise reduction is one of those violins that needs tuning and careful playing.

Sometimes it helps to start with the default values of all the tools and really screw one of them up and see what it does. Attack and Decay will give you heads and tails on people's words if it's set too high. Choppy correction if too low.

Frequency Smoothing gives you the ability to process one word as one correction and not multiple corrections depending on where your lips and tongue were.

Amount of correction should be as low as possible. Too little and the noise doesn't change and too much brings up all the little errors and artifacts. Start with not enough correction always, then sneak up on a good amount.

All these tools should be done in Audacity 1.3.12, not 1.2.

There is another tool that can be useful. Effect > Noise Gate. That one establishes a noise floor. If the sound drops below that value, it turns to silence. You can overdo that one as well. Start with very little correction.

As with any violin, the humidity and condition of the performance are important. You can't take out trash that is acoustically very close to the show. You can't, for example, remove one voice without affecting the others. White Noise is very difficult because it has characteristics similar to a lot of musical instruments.

I know this isn't your problem, but we urge people very strongly to capture the show perfectly and not depend on post production corrections. It's never the same.

Koz

[rimbaud65]

It's probably the result of over-aggressive noise reduction. If you still have the original non-noise-reduced files, try again with a lower setting. I usually go for 9 dB - any more and you are inviting the kind of effect you've noticed.

Alternatively, it could be tape "stiction" - squeaky tape, but this is highly unlikely as cassettes never (to my knowledge) suffered from that problem.

http://www.tangible-technology.com/tape/baking1.html

-- Bill

I've taken your advice and has it set now at 9 db. The squeking doesn't appear on that setting, and although there still is detectable noise it still is much better that it was before without noise reduction. Somehow I figure you have alot of experience, so more or less I kind of leaning on you here. I haven't figured a way to mechanize the track-splitting so I have done that manually, however you can use the tools. Silence finder hasn't worked but it does matter, also, the music I've been trying it on. Pink Floyd and some of those records, which in fact doesn't have normal splittings. If I only could get that manual labor out of the way, consisting of going through the file and setting those trackings, Audacity would be pretty much perfect for me.

[billw58]

I haven't figured a way to mechanize the track-splitting so I have done that manually, however you can use the tools. Silence finder hasn't worked but it does matter, also, the music I've been trying it on. Pink Floyd and some of those records, which in fact doesn't have normal splittings. If I only could get that manual labor out of the way, consisting of going through the file and setting those trackings, Audacity would be pretty much perfect for me.

I have never relied on automatic track splitting. I've done maybe 100 LPs. No automatic tool is going to find the "just exactly perfect" spot to put the track split. Plus I like to fade out the vinyl surface noise, adjust track spacing, etc. A "labour" of love, so to speak.

-- Bill

[rimbaud65]

This is a follow up just to get across that I actually have been using Audacity to the point where I've gotten my chosen cassettes over to CDs. In other words, I'm very satisfied with Audacity and the initial help I got here. Haven't done an exact count of it but it is probably about 270 records I can listen to now on CDs with better sound and with the assurance that the music I have had on these cassettes have been saved for many years to come.

[kozikowski]

...with the assurance that the music I have had on these cassettes have been saved for many years to come.

Until the CDs wear out. I don't want to suggest mechanical abuse, although that happens, too. I mean Recordable CDs use technology similar to color photography. Don't leave one on the back shelf of the car in the sunlight. We got one old Data CD out of the file cabinet and it had faded to the point we had to go around the building until we found a CD player that could still read it.

Long Term Digital Storage has been batted around several times on the forum and everybody take a different tack. Multiple duplicate hard drives, cloud storage, etc. You also need to be careful you don't pick a storage medium that's dying. Here's my resume. It's on this floppy...

Since music doesn't go through physical medium any more, the CD's days are numbered.

Koz