[Blindtlk] Transferrincassettes to audio file

Mon May 16 15:32:07 UTC 2016

Erika,

While the actual process isn't necessarily difficult, there are things you need to be aware of.  First, in my experience, I have had occasional trouble transferring analog sources such as cassettes to digital using a computer with occasional loss of audio along the way.  It can almost sound similar to what you get when a CD is dirty.  I had cases where an hour long recording was fine except for a minute in the middle.  This probably means something happened that took a lot of computer resources.  Whatever method you choose, you will want to check the first few recordings very carefully to gain confidence.  Some sound cards are better than others in avoiding this.  It also may depend on other circumstances as well.  You are also going to want to make sure you have your Windows sounds separated from your recordings.

What I ended up doing was to use my BookSense to record from cassettes and reels and then transferring the files from that device to my computer.  The purists among us will tell you that the sound circuits in a device like a BookSense are of lower quality than what you can buy for a computer, but I also found that the quality of my old cassettes was pretty good but not great.  I therefore heard no loss of quality in doing that.  I did hear a loss of quality when using the first version of the Victor Reader Stream, though.  If you have a device like the BookSense or the newer Stream try that out to see what you think of the quality.  The tradeoff of being more certain that some computer event doesn't mess up a recording may be worth it.  If you have access to a digital recorder such as one of the Olympus models, that may be an even better option.  Whatever you do, you should try to record in the WAV format even though that takes more space because there can be problems with simultaneously converting to digital plus performing audio compression as happens when going to MP3.

Depending upon your computer, you may not have the problems I mention above, but you could also record a bunch of cassettes and not realize until later that there were problems.  Such problems may not be a huge deal with speech recordings but would really mess up music.

A program such as Audacity can really do a nice job cleaning up cassettes.  Noise reduction can remove hiss and make them almost sound better than the originals.  However, this process can also be deceiving.  One needs to be careful because the excitement of getting rid of hiss can keep one from noticing other effects of the process that are not so good.  I had a cassette upon which was recorded the Simon and Garfunkel album Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme from a record.  In that case, I used a process to get rid of some record crackle.  It was wonderful, I was able to get rid of almost all of the crackle and I was truly amazed.  However, later when I actually listened to the entire album, I came across one song that had an intentionally distorted guitar melody throughout.  My crackle reducer pretty much removed that guitar completely, thinking it was crackle.  I just never thought about that happening.  Any noise reduction can create side-effects that you may not hear right away.  Therefore, one needs to use such processes carefully, and take time to listen to the results to be careful you don't create something that you might find more annoying than the hiss or crackle you remove.

Good luck with the project.  My point here isn't to scare you off, but rather to make the point that some extra thought and work at the beginning might save you some disappointment and wasted time later.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

-----Original Message-----
From: blindtlk [mailto:blindtlk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Weingartner, Paul via blindtlk
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2016 9:40 AM
To: Blind Talk Mailing List <blindtlk at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Weingartner, Paul <PWeingartner at ag.org>
Subject: Re: [Blindtlk] Transferrincassettes to audio file

Ericka, we are constathly transfering cassettes to digital. In our office we have a cassette player that transfers the audio to an mp3 and stores it on a thumb drive independent of a computer.
We have a netork of volunteers using a cassette deck that is tied directly to the audio card of a PC using rca cables from the lowlevel outputs on the back of the deck. They use an opensource program called Audacity to make the transfer. Once it is all conneccted it funtions with very lttle attention.
	Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: blindtlk [mailto:blindtlk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Ericka via blindtlk
Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2016 9:24 PM
To: Mailing List Blind Talk
Cc: Ericka
Subject: [Blindtlk] Transferrincassettes to audio file

My boyfriend is trying to help me reduce my clutter by transferring cassettes to audio file saving them on CDs. Yes the easiest solution is to just buy CD versions. Considering we have a zillion CDs to be burnt and want to use them up, what's the easiest way to do this with great quality sound? If there's a techno geek way to do this, I'm willing to pass it onto my boyfriend. I won't know what I'm reading, but he will. Theyre seems to be an easier way to do this then playing music through a cassette player and having the microphone hooked up to a computer record it. I have a GPX boombox with cassette and CD capabilities but don't think I can record to a blank CD. I think you can do that the other way around though – CD to blank cassette. 

Thanks for any help someone can provide.

Ericka Short
"What is right is not always popular; what is popular is not always right."

 from my iPhone
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