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Transferring cassette tapes to CD

FFTT

FFTT

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Apr 17, 2004
2,952
1
A Stoned Throw From Ground Zero
This falls under the "I should know this by now" catagory.

I have a Pioneer cassette deck and some old tunes mastered to cassette
that I'd like to convert to CD and possibly MP3.

I have my G5's stock audio inputs or I could use my M-Audio PMIO
as an interface if necessary.

I also have Toast Titanium.

I'm just wondering about the easiest way to save these old tapes to digital format.
 
zimv20

zimv20

macrumors 601
Jul 18, 2002
4,402
11
toronto
it's just like recording any other source, except your cassette deck probably has consumer outs @ -10. if your input is looking for a balanced +4 signal, your levels will be low.

you'll need to buy/borrow a 2-channel preamp and add about 18 dB of gain to get good signal.
 
FFTT

FFTT

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Apr 17, 2004
2,952
1
A Stoned Throw From Ground Zero
Thanks Zim,

Just not sure what program I should use for simple stereo remastering.

Seems a bit overkill recording 2 channels into ProTools M-Powered to burn
a simple CD of this old stuff.
 
scottlinux

scottlinux

macrumors 6502a
Sep 21, 2005
691
1
Audacity, Sound Studio, Ardour, to name a few possibilities. Good for simple straight forward recording. The best 2-track recording program for PPC OS X is one called Sparke ME, which isn't available anymore. But can be found via P2P.
 
FFTT

FFTT

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Apr 17, 2004
2,952
1
A Stoned Throw From Ground Zero
Well after connecting the tape out through my Project Mix, it was super
easy recording into Sound Studio.

Unfortunately now I'm trying to use copys to scrunch into MP3's
and every time I try, it says I can't save the file to MP3.
It saved to wav fine, to aif, and to m4a but no joy to MP3

Some of these tunes are 50-90MB each so there's no way I can share them on my dialup signal.
 
FFTT

FFTT

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Apr 17, 2004
2,952
1
A Stoned Throw From Ground Zero
I imported into iTunes checking MP3 Encoding in preferences, just as a test and it's still showing the file as 76MB.
I then reconverted it and it's down to 4.7MB, so I guess that's the best I'm gonna do.
 
R

rbrhrbr

macrumors newbie
Jan 14, 2007
2
0
FFTT said:
This falls under the "I should know this by now" catagory.

I have a Pioneer cassette deck and some old tunes mastered to cassette
that I'd like to convert to CD and possibly MP3.

I have my G5's stock audio inputs or I could use my M-Audio PMIO
as an interface if necessary.

I also have Toast Titanium.

I'm just wondering about the easiest way to save these old tapes to digital format.
Click to expand...

I use an iMic USB audio system with Audio Hijack Pro.
 
FFTT

FFTT

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Apr 17, 2004
2,952
1
A Stoned Throw From Ground Zero
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