How to Turn a Cassette Into a CD

Many people have great music and recordings on analog tape cassettes that aren't compatible with the latest car and home audio systems. Give those recordings new life by converting them into CDs.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Cassette player with a headphone out jack
• 1/8" stereo cable
• Home computer
• Free audio recording software

1. Set up your equipment. Plug your cassette play in near your home computer, and plug one end of the 1/8" cable into the headphone jack of the cassette player. Plug the other end into the "line in" jack of your home computer.

2. Make sure that your computer is equipped with good recording software. If you don't have any software currently installed, Audacity is an excellent free, open-source choice.

3. Rewind your tape, and start playing it. Don't worry about actually recording anything yet - you'll be trying to establish a good volume level. If the volume is too high, the recording will sound distorted. If it is too low, it can sound noisy when you increase the volume later.

4. After you've adjusted your volume setting so that everything sounds good, rewind the tape and start recording. Typically, if your computer has a good amount of memory, it is easiest to record the entire tape first, and then split it into tracks later. Make sure that the sound recording program is set to record at CD quality (16-bit) and in stereo.

5. Save the file as a WAV file. This is the quality that is most suitable for CD audio. You'll always be able to go back and compress the file later, if you'd also like to turn it into mp3 files.

6. At this point, you could burn the entire WAV file directly to a CD, but there are several other audio tricks that can improve the sound of the final recording.

7. Normalizing the sound boosts the overall volume of the recording without compromising quality. It does this by raising the volume of the entire track so that loudest part of the track is as loud as possible without distorting.

8. Many tape recordings suffer from hiss. If you find that this is a problem, many audio editing packages come with an add-in called "noise reduction." To use this processing, select a portion of your recording that should be silent. The software will analyze this selection to get an idea of background noise, which it can then try to remove from the rest of the recording. Be careful with this effect - if you try to remove every trace of noise on a very poor recording, your recording will sound over-processed and strange.

9. When you are satisfied with your recording, you can also chop the larger recording into smaller sound files. This can be helpful, as it will let you skip between songs easily on the CD.

10. Finally, burn your sound files to a CD using the software of your choice. Most operating systems have the software you'll need built-in, although there are third-party alternatives.

Tips & Warnings

• To make a more complete package, pay attention to cover art as well. For a home recording, you could scan the original insert for the cassette and then print it out as a CD cover.
• If your recording still sounds too quiet, you can boost the volume even more through an effect called compression. Be careful, however, as too much compression can make your recording sound noisy.
• Before messing around with effects, save a copy of the original recording. That way, if you make a mistake, you won't have to re-transfer the file to the computer.
• If you don't have a computer, there are also dedicated electronics to dub cassettes to recordable CDs. These give you a little less control over the process, and can be expensive, but also might be faster if you have a lot of tapes to process.

Resources

• Audacity Home Page