Cassette to mp3?

andrefrancis2

andrefrancis2

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I have an old cassete tape of personal songs recorded over 30 years ago that will not survive much longer in their present form :( and I need to get these onto my Mac in mp3 format.

I guess I will need a connection of some sort (earphones out of cassette machine?) from cassette to Mac but then is there any special software that I will need?

I have a G4 Digital Audio (466 mhz upgraded tp 1 ghz) with 10.3.3. I also have Quicktime Pro.

Can anyone help?
 
You could try fabbing an earphone (from cass.) to microphone cable if you're comfortable with working with wiring and electronics. I just don't know how well it'll work, i.e. sound quality. There's a couple factors which might cause issues with the quality.

I did something like that many moons ago with a boombox and external speakers, worked quite well. But that was to allow my player to drive bigger speakers...and was more of a, for the hell of it, type thing.

Why not go ahead and make a copy of the cassette to another, just to be safe, then look in the yellow pages for companies who specialize in 'saving' old media. There's alot of them out there who convert VHS in DVDs, and some do 'reel to reel' to CD so I'm sure they could do a cassette to CD for you. You're probably looking at 20$ to 30$ for something like that.
 
You can get a cable that will connect from the output on your tape player to the microphone jack on your Mac from Radio Shack for around $5. Then
you will need some software like Audiocorder ($20) to capture the sound on your Mac. Audiocorder will even let you do some "cleaning up" of the sound while you are at it. Then you can import the resulting MP3 file into iTunes and from there burn a CD either in MP3 or AIFF (standard audio CD) format. I have done this with a few ancient audio cassettes that were beginning to deteriorate and the result was good.
 
I've used Sound Studio to preserve some old vinyl and it worked well. Its shareware (about $60) but you can use it full featured for a couple of weeks first (pleasantly timed by the number of days you use it not the number of days since installation).

For big scratches you can also zoom in the offending area on (a big but very short spike, visible on the wave) and doing Insert-Silence. Since the spikes are normally very short and only on one channel, you can't tell that you've done it when you playback.

Also has decent Amplify and Normalize functions for getting the volume right. Then convert the AIFFs that Sound Studio gives you into MP3 with iTunes (as perfessor101 said.

Have fun :)
 
Note, the cable you'll probably need is RCA to mini stereo (the plug you use for headphones).
 
I second the suggestion of Sound Studio. It's great software, but lots of people are getting disillusioned by it, since the author is terrible at replying to support mail, and it's rarely updated. Amadeus II is also really nice, but I find that SS's interface works better for me. So anyway, unless your Mac has an audio input, get a Griffin iMic. To get from your tape deck to the computer, either run an RCA -> 1/8" cable, RCA to Y-adapter with 1/8" jack, or 1/8" to 1/8" from the headphone out on the cassette player. It depends on what your deck has. Then record into the software you use, then you'll have to read the software's docs to find out how to split it into tracks which you can import into iTunes and then convert to MP3.

Hope this helps...
 
Thanks to all of you (mdnky, perfessor, ora, dlloyd and hazmat). I will work through with your suggestions in the next couple of weeks ... and I am sure I will get the job done :)
 
Here's a really dumb suggestion, but one that I have used before....

If you have no audio input, but you have a digital camcorder, you can use use the a/v in's on the camcorder and record the audio that way. The video signal can be anything at all.

Then capture the video with iMovie, save it as uncompressed quicktime, and then Export the audio to an audio-only file via QT Pro.
 
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