I have a collection of cassettes that I would like to place on a CD. I
want to know the equipment/cables and software I need to take the
output from the cassette earphone out and placing it on a cd. I am
running Windows 98 with a CD burner and the associated software.

Hi Unicow,

Thanks for asking about recording from analog cassettes onto CDs.
You're not alone in wondering about this. To find you an answer, I
went to C|Net (http://www.cnet.com), a very useful source of
information on computing. They have an article appropriately called
"Record an MP3 from a Cassette" -- it can be found at
http://electronics.cnet.com/electronics/0-3219397-8-8749634-1.html?tag=mb
and has step-by-step instructions.

The jist: You will need a sound card like Creative Labs' Sound
Blaster; a cable with 1/8" plugs on either end (and an adapter, if
your headphone jack is the large kind usually found on stereo
components). This tutorial suggests MusicMatch Jukebox, but you could
use any other MP3 encoder as well.

I hope this is helpful. If not, please let me know!

Thanks
Libronaut

---

Clarification of Answer by libronaut-ga on 28 Jun 2002 16:00 PDT

Oh no! What a mess. Mother911 clearly did lots of work on this too. I
hope I didn't contribute to this problem!

While the response is adequate, I think that mother911-ga did a much
better job in answering the complete question in a context that I
could understand.

I unfortunately lost the lock to this question while researching, I
hope this additional information comes in handy.

Hey Unicow...

Wouldn't it be great if this was a little easier?

Unfortunately...it's a good deal of work, and requires some software
and some effort on your behalf.

Lets break your question into sections.

1. "I want to know the equipment"
Well...for the most part, you have the neccessary equiptment needed.
The cd burner, Software for that burner, and one last item...Cables
(the next part of your question).

2. "cables" 
You will need one cable. (depending on your sound card.) It is a 1/4
to Mini or mini to mini (1/8th) cable found at any radio shack or
similar store. They are about 4 dollars for a top of the line
connector. It should be a Stereo Connector, the only snag here is the
output of your Casstte. If it takes headphones out, bring those
headphones with you and show them to the person at the electronics
store. It is fairly simple to tell stereo from mono connectors, and
worse comes to worst. You would need to use mono to stereo.

3. "and software I need to take the  output from the cassette earphone
out and placing it on a cd."
Software is where we start to enter the land of many options.
Personally I can tell you I use a simple wav editor,it was freeware
mny years ago, i'm not sure of it's name. It's not a huge issue. Most
software for wave editing works the same. I also use ez cd creator.
Remembering that this is analog to cassette recording, and the sound
quality won't be amazing, I don't reccomend driving yourself insane
purchasing high end audio cards and hundreds of dollars in recording
software. Most cd burners come with some packaged cd software. You
would be able to use any of these. I included a link to a software
product that claims to clean the noise from cassette and LP to wav to
cd recording. Again...without going into huge expenses, this isn't
neccessary.

First things first. Links to software that you will need

Here is a pair of freeware audio wav editors.
wav recorder LP Recorder
http://www.waveflow.com/
http://www.e-soft.co.uk/

This is the home of EZ CD Creator.
burner software
http://www.roxio.com/

And lastly the sound cleansing software.
sound cleaning product
http://www.portlandmusiccompany.com/audioclean.html


With that said...let's move into the basic setup part of the answer.

First plug the audio cable from your earphone jack to the audio in on
your soundcard.
http://www.myivan.com/ovu/content/images/scards.gif this is a common
image from the back of a soundcard.
Now, here comes the fun.

I have included links to several different people describing how to do
this.

Directions
http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq03.html#S3-12-2
http://web.singnet.com.sg/~lion4/articles/diy/cassette.html
http://electronics.cnet.com/electronics/0-3219397-8-8750982-1.html

And I will give my basic directions.

First, open your wav editor/recording software. Put your selected
cassette cued to the song you want to record in the cassette player.
Start the wav recorder, start the cassette playing. I reccomend
recording one song at a time, remembering that this will be about 40
megs per song. When you have them recorded, edit them using the
software I found above. Chop off excessive intros and exits. Finally
load all the wav files into one folder so that it is easier to load
them into your burning software. Remember that most cd players allow
for only 650 megs of music per side, and cda and wav files are about
the same size.

I forgot to add my source, For each section I used different keywords.

For software:
Free wav editor

and for directions:
cassette to cd recording

Both in google.

Good luck recording

Mother911-ga

It sounds like you want to use your CD burner on your computer. 
However, speaking from personal experience, if you have a large number
of tapes to transfer, you could consider the convenience of a
standalone CD recorder deck.  Indeed, it will cost you more money, but
the experience and results may be worth it.  It is more likely to have
a better A/D converter than the average sound card and usually has
better connectors.  There is silence detection to automatically insert
track breaks; some models allow you to adjust the "silence" threshold.
 And you can have the machine go into pause mode automatically when
the input audio signal stops.

Sometimes the transfers are acceptable as is.  If not, you can stick
the CD into the computer for selective editing, following some of the
suggestions already posted.

I would go ahead and try the computer method first, since it does not
require a large dollar investment.  I have found using the standalone
deck to be much less time-consuming if you need to transfer entire
albums.  With either method, you should be able to get fairly good
results.

I managed to set my PC (bog standard Gateway machine with CDRW) up for
free about a year ago to record from cassette to CD, here’s how:
(a) Hacked the cable off an old pair of damaged stereo headphones
(same size jack as the PC sound card input).
(b) Got my old cassette/record player/radio out of the attic and wired
up the speaker outputs to the headphone cable (with a little testing
to check which wire was what).
(c) Downloaded a trial copy of PolderbitS sound recorder and editor
(http://www.polderbits.com) which I later registered because I liked
it so much.
(d) Downloaded a trial copy of Nero CD burner rather than the free
software my CDRW came with.

PolderbitS saves the sound as a series of tracks in wav format (you
check these out and can merge/create tracks in the editor part of the
software, it has a good automatic facility for finding gaps between
tracks).  You can then encode these with a number of shareware
utilities into MP3.

I have had great surprisingly high quality results and did not need to
clean-up the sound files.  A number of previously useless cassette
tapes have been revived as audio stereo CDs and as my CD player can
handle MP3 files, I have squeezed a 3 hour opera onto a CD and even my
old recordings of the whole of the Hitch-hiker’s guide radio series
onto half a CD.  As my old cassette player includes a radio, I can
listen to radio programs in the background without using any PC
processor power and even set up PolderbitS to record radio programs
when I’m out!

Of course for safety’s sake double check your sound card input
specifications to make sure you cannot damage your sound card by
putting in the wrong power levels.

> (b) Got my old cassette/record player/radio out
> of the attic and wired up the speaker outputs
> to the headphone cable (with a little testing
> to check which wire was what).

Dont Do This! The output from any reasonably modern amplifier's
speaker terminals could *easily* fry the inputs on a sound card, and
the impedance mis-match would most likely result in really bad sound
quality. If at all possible, use the line outputs from stereo
equipment, if available; These will have cleaner output than the
headphone jack in most cases. Use the headphone output as a last
resort, but don't run the speaker outputs into your sound card unless
you're Mad Scientist insurance is paid up...