Tapes! Driving me round the loop…

As a teenager, I, like most others, got hooked on music. In those olden days we used to get around on mules and traded tracks on cassette tapes. Remember those days before the Internet, spending Saturday afternoons pirating your friend’s collection on high-speed dubbing? I sure do. Now it’s too easy, all this mp3 action. It gives these young punks little to no respect for the tunes they are pilfering.

My last trip home to my parents place saw them belly aching about the box with the million tapes and how much of their precious storage space it takes up. In these modern times, when it seems everything you own should be a virtual possession on your laptop, I did what any music collector would do in an effort to get with the times – I tried to dump the lot to computer.

My laptop doesn’t have a tape drive funnily enough, and the cassettes themselves, while having a familiar feel in my hand, seemed big and clunky after so long hidden in the closet. I found a dusty tape deck in the spare bedroom, connected the appropriate leads to it and my laptop, and began a series of fruitless attempts to record my long loved, tape enslaved music collection.

No matter what I tried, the sound came out distorted and nasty. I switched leads, ports, and recording devices, all to no avail. Almost defeated, I did what I should’ve done in the first place; consult the Internet.

There is, you’ll be glad to know, a way to transfer songs from both tapes and records into digital format on your computer. You will need:

• A tape deck for cassettes or a turntable for vinyl.

• A stereo, with an amplifier to connect to if your tape deck is a detached unit.

• A cable that connects the stereo's Audio Out to your computer's sound card Line In. The cable must convert the Audio Out RCA jacks on the stereo to the single 1/8 inch Line In jack on your computer (this is the hole with the little microphone symbol next to it, or an "in" arrow).

• On your computer – and this is super important - you need some kind of WAV file recording software, WAV to MP3 conversion software and then MP3 burning software, if you want to burn the tracks to audio CDs.

The tracks will be created as WAV files, which are pretty big files and average about 10mb per minute of music, so the more you plan to record the more space you’ll need. The average LP album is around 45 minutes, which requires 450 MB of hard drive space. Ouch!

WAV recording software is pretty easy to find. A couple that come recommend are LP Recorder (Trialware) and MusicMatch Deluxe. Each program is pretty straight forward, and both allow you to get up and running quickly. In each, just set the recording level and quality. Choose higher quality unless you are really tight for hard drive space.

Then hit record, start your album or cassette playing and press stop when the desired track (or tracks) are finished. Check the file recorded properly, then save it as a WAV file if the program hasn’t done so already.

Next you’ll need to convert your new files to MP3. Again, software is required for this process. There are a billion and one MP3 converters, but LP Ripper is the sister program to LP Recorder.
 

Good now you’re cooking with gas; so get those Old Skool tracks back in your playlist!

The Good Life