Cassette tape to laptop hardware?

[Tapehead]

Hi all, I have searched around here but am a bit lost with all the info, I just want a good quality usb convertor for my laptop that I can connect to my casstte deck line out.

What do you recommend? It is my own music recorded on tape with a lot of acoustic guitar and vocal backed by low key synth and percussion at times, there's a few rock tracks but nothing with a 'hard' sound, so I want to capture the fullness of the guitar's sound as much as possible.

[kozikowski]

We've had good luck with the Behringer UCA202

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/UCA202.jpg

The unit doesn't have a volume controls, so you can get into trouble if you recorded your cassettes really hot or high volume.

Koz

[Tapehead]

Thanks for the recommendation Koz I'll get one -good price.
Any difference between it and the 222 version?

I should be o'k on a fixed level for most recordings, If anything, the volume on some are a bit on the low side.

[kozikowski]

The closest I could come is the 222 is an "upgrade" of the 202. That's nice. How up is it? Nobody will say and I'm not going to drudge through the pages of specs to find out. The 202 has almost no latency as it is. I used it for sound-on-sound testing on our MultiTrack/Overdubbing tutorials.

Koz

[steve]

The 222 is pink and Behringer supply proprietary drivers for the 222 which may provide some extra features (I don't know what extra features if any, or if the proprietary drivers will work with Audacity). Other than that they appear to be the same.

[Tapehead]

Thanks for the info, seeing as it's known here I'll stick to the 202.

[Tapehead]

I've tried the 202 out and all I'm getting is a distorted mess coming through into audacity or other recording softwares. The waveforms aren't very high in the recording display.

Monitor via headphones on the 202 itself sounds fine, and the source cassettes don't cause distortion when recorded on my dvd recorder.

I'm wondering why the usb option in the device dropdown called 'microphone' usb audio codec?

Using win7 home on an acer laptop.

[steve]

I'm wondering why the usb option in the device dropdown called 'microphone' usb audio codec?

The USB audio chip that is used in the Behringer is also used in some USB microphones. Windows "sees" the chip (PCM2902), not what the device actually is. Unfortunately this may mean that Windows assumes that it is a microphone and applies a huge amount of gain to the signal (wrongly assuming that the signal will be much smaller than it really is). It may be necessary to go into the Windows Sounds Control Panel and set the recording level really low http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Mixer ... es#vistacp

(I don't have Windows 7 but I've not had this problem on XP, Vista or Linux)

[Tapehead]

Thanks steve, I tried it on an xp machine and it worked fine straight off. So then I figured that maybe a software update was required for win7. I found that there is a driver download for ASIO 32 and 64-bit on the the Behringer site. Now the dropdown reads line-in behringer usb and works fine.

download links are down this page.
http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/UCA202.aspx

I'm surprised that the driver didn't come on a mini-cd with the unit.

(It only seems to work on mme though, the sound comes through all muffled and distorted on directsound.)

[steve]

The release version of Audacity does not support ASIO (due to licensing reasons), but the driver that you downloaded includes both ASIO and WDM derivers, so Audacity will be using the WDM driver.

Thanks for the feedback - good to know it works OK on Win 7.