Burning cassettes to cd's

[demosthenes]

Hi guys,

Would appreciate it if someone can give me a very simple way to burn (a new word for me) cassettes to cd's.

I'd like to place the music, etc, to my pc from the cassette player and then place it onto cd's.

I run windows xp home. Thanks for your help.

Rgds,
Demos

[pangea33]

This is not really difficult but it takes a little reading, and some amount of trial and error, to get it down. I presume that you've got a soundcard with audio inputs. Most computers have this capability, even if using only onboard sound cards. You need an adapter cable that connects stereo rca jacks to the 1/8" input on your sound card. Next you need a simple audio capturing program. There is probably something built in to Windows, but I tend to stay away from a lot of what's built in in favor of quality (open source) third party software.

Audacity is an excellent program for capturing audio, you can get it here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Fire up the program, select your external audio input (connected to your tape deck with the adapter cable) as the source, hit record, and press play on the tape deck. You'll be capturing the cassette deck's output as raw wav data. Burn it to cd. Rinse. Repeat.

Here's a tutorial: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/manual-1.2/tutorial_basics_4.html

[classicsoftware]

You need a good sound card, a good stereo system and cable to connect the two..... You also need some decent software to capture the incoming sound.

[pangea33]

Just as a followup to Classic's post, you'll get decent results with most sound cards, but I HIGHLY recommend a seperate audio card vs something onboard. My machine uses an old Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live 5.1 MP3+. They're probably under $20 nowadays, but the quality exceeds that of my actual source tapes. For my source device I am using a rather crappy Technics dual cassette deck that was 6-8 years old when I got it 12-15 years ago. The final product is pretty excellent considering I'm compressing down to mp3 for the most part anyway.

[pentachris]

Also, don't run long audio cables with couplers stretching from your stereo in your living room to the computer in your office. The audio quality will suffer. Bring one to the other and use the shortest cables possible (6 feet is fine).

[demosthenes]

Also, don't run long audio cables with couplers stretching from your stereo in your living room to the computer in your office. The audio quality will suffer. Bring one to the other and use the shortest cables possible (6 feet is fine).

Thanks Guys for all the help. Will try this and advise. Have to get the cables, etc.

Here is another situation. This morning I followed the instructions and burned a song to a CD-R blank cd, but can't get it to play on my car's CD player. I took this song from Windows media player library -- it plays on the Windows player but try as I may, I can't get it to play in my car.

Any idea what could be the cause of this!

Rgds,
Demos

[azzey]

What software did you use to burn it?

[pangea33]

This morning I followed the instructions and burned a song to a CD-R blank cd, but can't get it to play on my car's CD player. I took this song from Windows media player library -- it plays on the Windows player but try as I may, I can't get it to play in my car.

Did you make sure to burn the disk as an audio cd rather than just burning your original file to the disk? It's an easy oversight to make. Also, with a lot of standard cd players, meaning standalone units and in dash cd players, you have to finalize the disk. Most burning software doesn't do this by default so that you can burn more data to the disk in a later session.

Lots of non-PC disk players can't recognize these disks unless you finalize the session. In Nero, this option is under the Burn tab on the Audio CD creation wizard. It's a checkbox labeled as "Finalize CD (No further writing possible!)"

[demosthenes]

Did you make sure to burn the disk as an audio cd rather than just burning your original file to the disk? It's an easy oversight to make. Also, with a lot of standard cd players, meaning standalone units and in dash cd players, you have to finalize the disk. Most burning software doesn't do this by default so that you can burn more data to the disk in a later session.

Lots of non-PC disk players can't recognize these disks unless you finalize the session. In Nero, this option is under the Burn tab on the Audio CD creation wizard. It's a checkbox labeled as "Finalize CD (No further writing possible!)"

Thanks pangea, I will have to look more closely at the burning instructions, etc, in the windows media player. Also I would have to fill the disk with songs, cause I don't want to finalise just one song.

To azzey: I didn't use any program, just followed the instructions in the help section of windows media player.