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Converting audio cassettes to CD.... |
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Using two freely available softwares called Audacity and
FreeSoundRecoder, you can easily convert your old audio cassettes into CDs.
Here are some tips on how to this. Both these softwares are extremely powerful to carry out the
task we have on hand. The beauty of these programmes is that both these are
available in the free versions. You can download the first
one, i.e. Audacity from here. The second one, called FreeSoundRecorder, can be
downloaded from here. You will need a shielded cable for connecting your cassette
player to the LINE IN pin of the sound card of the PC. A two core shielded
wire with audio jacks soldered at both ends as shown in the picture below can
be easily made at a very small price of around Rs. 70/- |
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Shown below is a cable made from a piece of 2 core shielded
wire available at any electronics hardware shop. Recording through a cable is a must. Otherwise the
surrounding sound in the room will get
recorded rendering an useless piece of recording. Shielded cable over
ordinary cable gives an added advantage of reduced electrical noise and
Supply Frequency hum in the recording.
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The second image here shows how the shielded cable with two
plugs get connected to the “Line Out” of the cassette recorder. It is
important to note and not to misinterpret that yellow and green plugs are
shorting Left and Right channels to each other. It is for the convenience of
making the joint that the wire from the green plug has been brought inside
the yellow socket.
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The third image shows how the stereo pin connects left and
right channels inside the pin. The ground or the shield is connected to the
innermost ring of the pin.
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The following steps describe the procedure in details assuming
you are new to Audacity. Here is a
video,Part-1and Part-2
with commentary in Marathi, showing the steps you will follow for recording the
Cassette. If you are comfortable in reading the steps rather than viewing the
video, here is the sequence you should follow. a) Put the
cassette in the Cassette player b) connect the
LINE OUT terminal of the cassette player to LINE IN terminal of the sound
card of your pc using the cable which
you made yourself. c) Do not run the
cable over electrical power wires. It may pick up Power Line ‘hum’ during the
recording. d) Start Audacity
and go to Edit/ preferences/ e) set the tracks
as Stereo. f) Go to Control Panel
and select Sound option and Double click it. g) Under the tab
MIXER, choose LINE IN for the sound card and close the Control Panel. h) Keep the volume
level to a very low level, on the cassette player as well as on the recording
tab of Audacity. i) Click the red
button on Audacity to start recoding. j) Start playing
the cassette with some delay of few seconds. k) You should see
the waveform being recorded in the Audacity window. l) Adjust the
volume control on the cassette player to minimum possible level while looking
at the clipping taking place in the
Audacity window. m) Stop the
cassette player after the volume adjustment has been done. n) Click on the
“goback” symbol on Audacity. o) Rewind the
cassette to the beginning. p) Restart the
recording by clicking the red button of Audacity q) Start the
cassette player again without touching the volume controls r) Allow the
process to continue till the cassette finishes playing. s) Click Stop
button on Audacity t) Save the raw
file recorded in Audacity by going to File/Save as/ option and giving a name indicating that it is raw recording.
e.g. mysongRaw. The file will be saved as a project with aup extension. u) When you view
the entire waveform of the recorded file, you will find some gaps indicating
start of a new song and end of an earlier one, or pauses in the recording. v) Select the
entire portion of the song by Right
clicking in the silence zone and dragging the mouse till end. w) Now start
FreeSoundRecoder after minimizing the Audacity. x) Click record
button and fill in the details of the file name asked by FreeSoundRecorder.
Give some unique name say mySong1. The extension will be automatically be
mp3. y) Maximize
Audacity and click on Play. z) Audacity will
play only the selected portion of the raw recording and stop. When this happens, stop the
FreeSoundRecorder also. Now, try listening to the mp3 file
generated by double clicking it. FreeSoundRecorder records whatever is being
played through the Computer speakers. Therefore, if you generate more tracks
in Audacity and play all, the FreeSoundRecorder will record all of them in a
single mp3 file. This feature can be used to add your voice comments to
beginning of any song. Audacity has got nice features of fading in and fading
out the selected portions of the waveform. Fading In is increasing the volume in the beginning of the waveform
gradually. Fading Out is gradual decrease of volume at the end of the
waveform. This creates a professional sounding effect on the voice
commentary, as the song in the background can be selectively faded. Thus, going through Audacity, you will
be able to split the contents of the cassette in different mp3 files which
will be easy to play selectively. Audacity can generate mp3 file directly
also. However, you need an additional DLL file for this. It is called
lame_enc.dll. You can download this file and keep it
in the same directory as that of the main programme audacity.exe. In the
option under File, you can see an option “Export Selection” when you run
Audacity. If lame_enc.dll is present on your pc then exporting the selected
portion as mp3 file is possible. Once you have collected desired number
of mp3 files, you can make a CD out of these using a software like NERO express or
CDburner. Questions are welcome at [email protected] For more on Audacity with
examples, click here..
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( These programs are freely
available from their official sites. Please visit official sites for latest
versions and terms of use .. )
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download lame.dll required for Audacity |
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