Converting Cassettes to Mp3 or CD

Converting an audio cassette to an mp3 file requires only a cassette deck, a mini-plug to stereo RCA cable, and some audio editing software. Fortunately, an excellent audio editor, Audacity, is available for free, and for all all platforms - Windows, Macintosh, and linux! Note that after installing Audacity, you need to locate and download the free LAME mp3 encoder library, if you want to export to mp3.

To convert a tape, I go through the following steps:

• Set recording preferences in Audacity to stereo or mono, and to a desired sampling rate.
• Start the tape. Select "monitor input" in Audacity, and adjust the recording level so that there is a good strong signal, but no clipping (the level never reaches 0 dB).
• Rewind and record the first side of the tape. Although Audacity does not have a record timer function, Mac users can use an Applescript program to stop recording after a specified number of minutes.
• Flip the tape and record again. Each recording session becomes another pair of tracks in the current Audacity project.
• When everything is recorded, start editing:
  • Trim leading and trailing silence from each (pair of) tracks.
  • Run the Amplify effect on each track, accepting the default amplification amount.
  • Copy and paste all the tracks end to end after the first, then remove the extra tracks.
• Export the whole thing as an aiff or mp3 file.

Before I figured this out, I used the commercial service Cassettes2CDS.com.