How to Convert Cassette Tapes to CD

Video Transcript

"Hi, it's Rokosz, your digital lifestyle expert here and I'm going to show you how to convert your old cassette into CDs. Now there's a couple ways to go about doing this. First off, if you own a CD burner by itself, as not part of a computer or anything like that, you can just wire this, the output sound of this through RCA cables into the input of a CD burner. Believe it or not they didn't have a lot of popularity as a standalone item. It's nothing something that we have kicking around the studio nor do we use, but there's a better more flexible way to do it because when you're doing a direct analog to CD burn, well if there's any mistakes or hiccups you don't have the ability to fix it. So what we like to do is import it digitally into a computer then we can mess around with the files, sweeten it, take out some of the flat tape sound, boost it up, make it nice and then burn a custom CD. So it's pretty straightforward. What you want to do is you want to take your audio out. On the back of this guy here, plug it directly into your microphone input on the computer and that's it, we've got now a direct line, the raw sound as a line feed coming out of this tape player going into the microphone input here. Now when you setup your machine you're going to tell it it's a line feed as opposed to a microphone feed, that means it's a direct one not coming from a microphone and you're going to do that in your favorite program whether it be iMovie, you can start it as a voice over and do it that way or there's some other good, free conversion options out there. Free programs for both PCs and Mac to do that and the procedure is pretty good for both types. Once you get it in there then you can decide to edit it, just sort of cut the head and tail on it and then simply burn it off to a CD and store it as a high quality MP3 or AFI file, Mp3 not being a high quality file, but much more high quality than your analog cassette tape. So remember, it's about feeding it and recording into a computer first, utilizing a specific program of your choosing and just executing the burn CD function on it. It couldn't be easier, then you can toss those old tapes, or hey, can sell them at a garage sale or eBay, somebody will buy that stuff. I'm Rokosz, your digital lifestyle expert saying stream you later."