I have or should have access soon to some cassette tapes of my step son’s biological father singing and preaching when he was a Christian prior to him passing. My wife asked me if I knew of where she could get the cassette tapes put to CD. Remembering a friend of mine putting VHS to DVD, I thought I would do a quick search and see how hard it would be to do on my own. After reading several sights, I came up with my own way of doing it. It’s really cost effective and would be enjoyable to do for my step sons. My son also has a cassette tape of me and his mom singing when he was a baby prior to her passing. He also has a couple cassettes of his great grandmother either talking or singing. I can’t remember. But it would be my pleasure to transfer these cassettes to DVD for them.
If you are interested in doing this yourself, you will need to download Audacity and Lame MP3 encoder. Under Audacity go to Edit>Preference>Devices. Set your system up to where you are recording from either the front or rear input jack. Then under the same window clinking the different indexes, find where it says MP3 Export Library. Under the version of Audacity I have it is Libraries. Hit the browse button and find the file lame_enc.dll, select it and hit okay.
After you have plugged your cassette recorder into the computer, hit record on audacity and hit play on the cassette tape. Let it play for a few seconds then stop it it. We need to check the settings. Go to File>Export, choose MP3 or what ever file format you want, give it a name and hit the Save button. A box might appear asking for title, album etc…. You can ignore that by just hitting the save or okay button. Go to your saved file and hit play. If there is a lot of hissing in the track then I will show you later how to get that out. If the volume and everything else sounds okay, remember this is coming from a cassette so it’s not going to be regular CD quality, then rewind the tape and repeat the steps by hitting record on audacity and the play on the cassette player. There is no need to sop the cassette player after each song. What you will do is after that side of the cassette player has recorded, you will high light each individual song by going to one straight line to the next straight line, which means a pause between songs, and exporting it and giving it it’s appropriate name.
If there is noise in the track, prior to saving the track, high light the song or entire cassette and go to Effects>Noise Removal. Follow the onscreen instructions from there. You do not want to adjust the settings to much as it will cause the track to sound worse then when recorded. After you do this, then follow the steps above to save the file.
It’s good to know this because my son has cassette tapes of me and his mom singing when he was a baby and he also has a cassette tape of his great grandmother. I don’t remember if she was singing or just talking on these tapes but it will be a wonderful gift for my step sons and my son to get these cassettes on DVD. For both the great grandmother and the step boys father have since passed. If you have any problems, just do a Google search for transferring cassettes to CD and you will find a wealth of information.
There is one sight that charges money for the information to do this. I don’t recommend paying for this at all for it is quite simple. Thank you for reading and God Bless.