How to Copy a Cassette to a Hard Drive

Memories of our youth, old demos, vintage music and important information, such as messages from antiquated answering machines, were once recorded on cassette tapes that can easily be destroyed by tape players. Worse, the tapes themselves can decay into unplayable cassettes that can pile up as useless junk. One way you can preserve your memorabilia is to safely transfer them digitally onto your computer hard drives so that you may continue to enjoy them and share with future generations.

One inexpensive way to do that is to take your cassette tapes and play them through a tape player with the speaker outputs connected to a computer with a line-in input and record them with readily available recording software that comes with your computer and save them as digital formats for immediate and later access.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Cassette player with a stereo headphone jack (1/8 or 1/4 inch)
• 1/8 to 1/8 inch stereo mini-jack cable (1/8 to 1/4 inch adapter if necessary)
• Macbook Pro (or PC) laptop with mini-jack line input
• Quicktime Pro

Set Up Your Signal Flow

1. 
    

   Connect your cassette player stereo headphone jack to your computer's mini-jack line input using the 1/8 to 1/8 inch mini-jack cable.

2. 
    

   Make sure you are connected to the line-in jack on your computer and not the headphone jack.

3. 
    

   Open Quicktime Pro and set the microphone input preferences to "Line In."
   
   Adjust recording preferences from the pull-down menu: Quicktime Player > Preferences > Recording > Microphone > Built-in Input: Line-in.

4. 
    

   Select a new recording instance from the pull-down menu: File > New Audio Recording.

5. 
    

   Play a cassette to make sure your signal is not too high or too low or that your cable is not shoddy. (Crackling noises or constant dropping of audio signal is a sign of shoddy cables; replace with good ones if so). You can also monitor the level of your input by attaching headphones to your computer headphone jack.

Record Your Signal

6. 
    

   Press the "Record Button" on Quicktime Pro before pressing "Play" on your cassette player. Continue recording until all the content you wish to archive has been recorded, stopping only at the end of a tape to have all the tape content in one file for editing later.

7. 
    

   Save your file and listen back to ensure quality before export.

8. 
    

   Export the track as an AIFF or WAV, 44.1kHz 16bit for CD quality or another available audio format of your preference. As AIFF or WAV, you can burn them as CDs for archiving. Later, you can convert these AIFF or WAV files as MP3s.

Tips & Warnings

• Cleaning the magnet heads of the cassette player with cassette player cleaners before this process helps maintain safety of old cassettes.
• Old tapes tend to get chewed up by cassette players so make sure that your tape is not already tangled lest you risk completely destroying the cassette tape and player.

Resources

• Quicktime Pro (Mac)
• Quicktime Pro (PC)
• Amazon.com for electronic needs and tape cleaners