Calling all Computer Gurus

[xs11jack]

OK, here is one more disruption in your life, those of you who are computer whizzes. Does anyone know how to use a computer to take a cassette tape and copy it on to a DVD??
Ole "lost in the sixties" Jack

[DGXSER]

At least you did not say an 8-track!! I am old enough to recall when Cassete tapes came out, and my kids barely know what a CD is, they live in an MP3 world with IPODs.

[TopCatGr58]

Hey Jack,

You may be mixing your technology terminology here!?

You say "Cassette" tape, which brings to mind AUDIO cassettes. But then you say to put it on a DVD....which is a VIDEO disc. SO....now I'm thinking you mean a VIDEO CASSETTE tape that you want to dub/copy onto a DVD Video disc...right??

Okay, I actually do that, but you have to have some special hardware on your computer to do this. PLUS...are you talking about a HOME MADE/Recorded video cassette....like home movies....or are you talking about a COMMERCIAL made movie that you like, but perhaps can not find on DVD format??

Again, I do that also, but you possibly need even more equipment to defeat the commercial COPY PROTECTION that is on the later made video cassette tapes...Macrovision ring a bell?? The other hardware is a special video CAPTURE card that can import/capture ANALOG...TV signal from a Video cassette player, and then convert it into DIGITAL format, but then there's extra "authoring" processing required to put it into DVD playable format before you actually burn it onto a DVD disc that can be played in any set top DVD player or computer DVD player!

SO...feel free to PM me regarding this, and it may be much easier to just send me the video cassette you want converted, and then I can do the work and send you the finished DVD(s) if extra copies needed for family members and such!

IF you did mean an AUDIO cassette..that's easier....just need to connect your Cassette deck to your stereo receiver, then connect the AUDIO OUT RCA type jacks to an RCA to Mini Jack Stereo headphone type plug..plug that INTO your Line IN plug in your audio card/connectors on your computer, and then use a decent quality audio recording/editting program to record the audio into WAV file format. Then you can use a CD burning program to make an AUDIO CD that can be played in a CD player!

T.C.

[b.walker5]

Not sure if you know about it TC, but you can connect a VCR to most digital video cameras and then dub directly to the computor (with appropriate software). Have done many video tapes this way. Panasonic VCR, Canon Video Camera, Laptop with a Firewire port and Divx Video Capture, job done.

[haywardguy929]

Yeah a little confusing but my thoughts are if you want to record a cassett, why not dub to a CD, not a DVD which is for video. I would think you can just down load to your computer directly from the CD to a file.

[ccogswel]

It would cost about a hundred bucks but if he meant VHS to DVD he can just buy a combo VHS/DVD recorder. Burn VHS tapes directly to DVD. Then he could copy that DVD to his computer. But if he is talking about cassette tapes he can plug in any old player to a MIC jack on any computer to record and poof you have digital. Poor quality but digital. Either way good luck!

[xs11jack]

Sorry I got here so late. What I ment was I have a bunch of audio cassettes I play in my basement shop, but I have a CD player in my car and my living room. I want to record the audio cassettes on to music CDs and sing along with them in the car. My voice does wonders to the surrounding traffic when I leave the car windows down! TC and all of you, you have given me the info I need, I think!! I will try it this weekend and report back.
Now DGXSER, funny you should mention 8 track tapes!!! In 1967, fresh out of the military I bought a brand new Dodge R/T with the 440 engine and 4 on the flow. Now I just had to have music so I installed an 8 track player under the dash. Boy, talk about the cat's meow!! Now for the rest of the story, last summer, I aquired a 1960s entertainment center that is in great working condition, but I have no 8 track cassettes to try out the player. Every thing else works. Story of my life, everything a little short of what I need.
Ole Jack

[DCII]

Jack talk about progress my 69 Charger R/T came with a factory installed 8 track in the AM only radio two speaker system, IIRC one in the front and one in the back, no room for two in the back as the other speaker hole was used for the factory rear window defogger. I hate to admit it but I think I still have about 100 tapes and a couple of player/recorders in my office I am not sure when they stopped installing 8 track players in cars but I can remember having a 1982 Olds 88 Royale that had a factory unit in the radio, by this time it was AM/FM

[XS1100 Newbie]

TC is right. If it is a commercial VHS tape, then you are not just going to dub it from the recorder. If it is old enough to not have the Macrovision protection, then it will work. Unless you plan on doing a lot of these, i would PM tc about doing it for me, or you can purchase the illegal equipment to do it yourself. I say illeagal, cause as far as i know, they don't sell the equipment any more to do that. I have a little box i bought out of Israel to help me.

[Jerry]

Several articles on-line on about how to do this. One is at:

http://www.wikihow.com/Transfer-Cassette-Tape-to-Computer

Key is how much editing do you want to do, or just record straight across. The article mentiones the free Audacity program, which I have used a couple times to try and "clean up" a few tapes.

Bascially you use the RCA outputs on a tape deck to go into your computer's Mic or Line In ports via an adapter cable that has RCA jacks on one end and a sub-mini jack on the other, or buy an adapter that lets you use a USB port. Fire up your recording software (Microsoft Record is included in Windows) and hit the Play buton on your deck. The system will record your song (or entire tape) to your hard drive. The you need a Cd burning program such as Nero to create a music CD and a CD-burning drive.

Old tapes may not be great to begin with and transfering them without any editing may give less than top-quality results. Still it is nice to have them converted for the songs that you don't want to (or can't) get otherwise.

By the way, same process works for converting records, except you may need a pre-amp in line to bost the signal input into your PC if you come straight off a turntable. Most of the time you would use the headphone jack output of your amp as the input source for your PC. Play with the volume setting; it is very easy to overdrive the PC inputs if you go to high with the volume settings.

[TopCatGr58]

Some more info you may helpful!

Hey Jack,

Glad we were able to provide you the tech info you needed to "get-r-done"!
As Jerry said, you'll need to find the audio properties slider controls for your soundcard to adjust the volume level of the Line In connection so that it doesn't make it TOO LOUD...which will cause it to become TOO DISTORTED. Hopefully the Audio Recording program and your soundcard will work together to show the actual recording levels like a "VU" meter so that you can set them, keep them from jumping too much into the RED level.

Also, most audio recording programs have an editting function called NORMALIZE which usually with a CD burning program will set the maximum volume levels of all of the tracks to the same level...so you don't a real loud song, then a real quiet one where you have to keep adjusting the player volume. But with the Editting program, using it will adjust the volume of the AUDIO file/track you are working with to the maximum volume level without pushing it into the distortion level.

Most later quality audio cassettes were created with the DOLBY noise reduction process....which is supposed to help reduce the upper frequency tape hiss that is inherent with cassette tapes....as well as help to boost the dynamic range of the music along with the bass to help it get closer to realistic sound.

Okay....learning warning! Hopefully you're familiar with the standard scale of SOUND...decibels...from your AVATAR...jet engines put out what...150-200! Okay......Full live orchestral music's decibel dynamic range is from total silence....00 up to 110 or so for full volume. Audio cassettes have a considerable less range....about a maximum of ~60 decibels....and the tape hiss is around 20 or so...so you can't enjoy the true silence of a song/track. Listening to them in a CAR wasn't a problem because of all of the ambient road/car/engine noise. Records have a wider dynamic range...but you can still hear the "rumble" in the quiet sections, and the top end it around 70 or so decibels. But to help enhance the overall sound....increase the bass, etc. the RIAA built in some special encoding....that gets decoded when you run the turntable's signal into/THRU the preamp/AMP's PHONO input jack...if you plug it into just an AUX input of the AMP, the record will sound very FLAT with little variance in volume/dynamic range, much less bass as well. SO...that's why you DON'T want to plug a turntable into the computer...but run it into the Preamp/AMP's phono input first....then to the computer.

SO....with the cassettes...you'll want to use a decent quality tape player with the DOLBY function availble...and you can spice up the signal...boost the bass and treble a bit with your frequency equilizer on the preAmp/Amp BEFORE sending the signal to the computer. CD audio has essentially the same capacity as Orchestral music with a 100+ decibel dynamic range recording and playback ability. SO....the nicer the signal is before it gets to the computer's recording input, the nicer it will be when you finally burn it to CD!

When I first got into music around 14 y/o, they were transitioning from 4 tracks to 8 tracks. I saw how fragile tape was, the tendency for people to steal them, etc., so I got an 8-track home recorder, and invested in ALBUMS, then I would record them myself onto tape. I would buy the 60 and 90 minute versions of tapes, and then calculate the different songs durations so that I could record albums songs WITHOUT having that annoying splitting of songs to span a track change on the 8-tracks!

THEN...when Cassettes came out, I again invested in a home recorder, and then re-recorded my albums onto cassette. I rarely played my albums, kept them in rather pristine condition, and saved $$$ by not having to rebuy my music across the changing technology formats. I've done the same thing yet again with CD's!

With your audio recording program...I've also used the FREE Audacity program, works well, but I learned with the earlier Soundblaster Applications..creative Wave recording programs.....you can select the quiet sections before and after each song to trim them down to just a second or so to help keep the file size as small as possible. You'll need to be sure that the program's recording settings for file type(WAV) and parameters are for 44khz 16 bit sampling rate...Stereo Mode. This is the CD audio rate, and is needed for burning them to CD. Wav recording occurs at ~ 10MB a minute, so a 4-5 minute long song will be ~50 or so megabytes in file size. And Audio CD...which is just a normal DATA CD that has songs recorded onto it, will hold about 80 MINUTES of music.....most commercial CD's are NOT filled to capacity...so you can sometimes actually fit 2 albums onto 1 CD, so calculate how many minutes worth of music for your songs....and you can determine how much you can fit onto a CD. I recommend working with just 1 song at a time because of the inherent large file sizes you'll end up with, and it's easier/quicker to EDIT the files when they are just one song long...otherwise the editting program takes more processing time when you are trimming and modifying the audio/Wav files after you have recorded them.

Most CD burning programs in the MUSIC CD mode will show you how much space(minutes) you have used and how many you have left as you add songs to the burning que!

Okay, hope we/I haven't overwhelmed you with this technobabble, but it's important to know and understand what you are doing, what you want to do, so that you can possibly get the best QUALITY sound out of this DUBBING of your music to CD process. Remember to SELECT CLOSE the CD as part of the burning functions...this way it can be played in ANY CD player...otherwise, it may only work in your computer.

ENJOY and hope you end up with a bunch of fun music CD's that you can sing along with!

[crazy steve]

I'll throw a bit more info out there....

TC has covered all the basics, but a few points bear going over a bit more. He recommends doing one song at a time and that's excellent advice, but another reason for doing so isn't mentioned. When transferring to CD (or more likely, your hard drive for editing), if you want 'track markers' (these tell the CD player when each track/song starts/ends) if recording more than one song you'll have to manually insert these. If you do one song at a time, it's done automatically.

Another point is it's best if you 'assemble' the tracks to your hard drive first as was pointed out. But when burning the final-edit tracks to the CD, make sure you select 'all at once' (or however your program identifies it) so that you burn all tracks in one continuous burn, automatically 'closing' the CD when it's done. I've found that doing individual tracks can sometimes leave nasty 'artifacts' (loud pops) between tracks. Remember, any mistakes made on a CD-R are permanent and can't be removed or recorded over.

Two other things that may bear mentioning depending on how picky about sound quality you might be. One, most of the 'free' burning programs have only limited editing/sound processing functions, so a 'upgraded' program might be called for. Two, not all computer sound cards are created equal; very few are as good as what you'll find in a decent audio system. The analog-to-digital convertors in these cards are rarely audiophile quality, particularly if your computer is older. I got around this by getting a 'commercial' TASCAM CD-R/RW burner (looks like a cassette deck) that connects to my audio system, not the computer. I do 'rough' recording onto CD-RW discs, then move those to the computer for final editing/burning. I then can use the RW discs for another recording. Another advantage is I don't have to make/remake connections if changing input formats (from records to tape, etc).

This is a time-consuming process. Not at all like dubbing a cassette tape, where you could just load a blank tape into a dual-well deck, turn it on and walk away. To be honest, if the source material is available on a commercial CD, you may find it less trouble to just buy that. A no-cost alternative is to see if your local library has these albums available for check-out on CD and just burn copies. Another suggestion is burn two of every disc you make, particularly if you plan to use them in a car. Archive one copy, that way if the other gets damaged you easily replace it.

I do have to ask TC about his 4/8 track timeline.... Jeez, 4 tracks were disappearing when I bought my very first car deck... in 1968! That first deck was a combo unit (able to play both), the last 4 tracks I saw new was in the mid 70s....

[xs11jack]

Wow, this has been a really great learning expirence on music files. I can't thank you guys enough! I am in the process of setting up the stuff that I need to do the recording. At first I will just record a whole album, but when I get more expirenced, I want to edit out some songs that I don't care for. I eventually I want to do the whole nine yards, and make even my 33 rpm records portable on tape or CD, or both. Thanks again.
Ole Jack

[xs11jack]

Oh Yea, I almost for got the rest of the rest of the story about the 8 track and the new R/T. From the dealer I drove to my buddy's house to give him and his wife a ride which I did. But, when backing out of his driveway to leave, the driveshaft FELL OFF!!! 42 miles on it. Found out the driveshaft at the universal joint into the rear end was missing two of the four bolt it was supposed to have and one of those was only 1/2 way in. That, fortunately was the last repair until I traded it for a 66 Corvette.
End of story
Ole Jack

[crazy steve]

Wow, this has been a really great learning expirence on music files. I can't thank you guys enough! I am in the process of setting up the stuff that I need to do the recording. At first I will just record a whole album, but when I get more expirenced, I want to edit out some songs that I don't care for. I eventually I want to do the whole nine yards, and make even my 33 rpm records portable on tape or CD, or both. Thanks again.
Ole Jack

The possibilties are endless....

What's going on now is that CDs are on their way out to a degree. My new car will accept flash drives (AKA thumb drive), once I figure out how to load music onto those so the car will recognize it, I won't even need CDs in the car. My next upgrade for my home audio system is a stand-alone computer connected to it with all my music loaded into it for instant access of any song. A one terrabyte drive will hold something like 700 albums...